The Friday Article Roundup
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Jonathan Richman be damned, George Grella makes the case for art rock at Bandcamp Daily:
Art rock sets up rock music as a border that the music itself strives to dissolve—it creates by deconstructing its own origins. At the time of its release, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul was one of the premier art rock albums, each track like a solvent dissolving the edges of what were originally thought of as regular songs. Poets like Patti Smith and Jim Carroll made art rock; art-school kids formed Talking Heads and Romeo Void and made art rock; painters like Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) made art rock.
Jacob Oller isn’t very impressed with Faces of Death at The AV Club:
[Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s previous film Cam] offered shocking explosions of violence that punctuated a dread induced by realizing that technology you can’t understand has taken over your life in a way you can’t control. Faces Of Death, through its goopy set pieces and its pontificating speeches, simply dresses a good ol’ fashioned psycho up in the ephemera of reconsidered IP. An oddball aping a fake murder movie in reality is sort of amusing, but much of that framing (and the unwieldy thematic baggage it brings with it) just gets in the way of the film’s cat-and-mouse heart.
For In Review Online, Brandon Streussnig interviews Lily Gladstone about the storytelling balance in making of Killers Of The Flower Moon:
I think because of the responsibility of having grown up with oral tradition, where you do hear multiple versions of the same story, there’s no one right way. You hear a story evolve as the times evolve….That was one reason it was so important to work so closely with Osage folks on this, because there are so many unanswered questions from that period of time anyway. Opening the box and scratching the itch of the why can cause a little bit of snowballing. So we needed to approach it delicately, but also with enough room for reality to be as subjective as it is.
At his substack, Filipe Furtado muses on the nuance and bluntness contained in Robocop:
OCP is allowed only one meaning, that of unbridled capitalism, a disease afflicting the city of Detroit as it gradually privatizes it. Paul Verhoeven is a filmmaker who relishes ambiguities and double meanings, but when it suits his purpose, he is blunt and didactic and knows how to create without any nuance.OCP, as it appears in the film, is Verhoeven’s greatest contribution to the drama. When he first joined the project, the film’s main villain was the criminal played by Kurtwood Smith. The Dutch filmmaker had the idea of amplifying the political and comic overtones, focusing on the corporation that had created his main character and making Smith the executor of [Ronny] Cox’s executive misdeeds.
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Twelve, “Conflicts of Interest”
At first, I was thinking Garibaldi was actually likeable – still kind of sleazy, but doing good for people – but then he went and started whining about giving up his stuff after, you know, leaving the government. The plot of this episode is, whatever, but the concluding scene of Garibaldi and Sheridan squaring off almost makes it all worth it; the basic conflict is kind of stupid because you know, this show being what it is, that they’ll get back together, but it comes close to the illusion that this is actually gonna go somewhere.
The “I wanna keep my STUFF” bit happens with another character this season, I think it hasn’t happened yet so I’ll be vague, and it’s even worse! I do think part of this is on the show not quite realizing its setting — the “we have a shantytown of poor people in space” is the worst aspect of this, but the other end is how quarters are generally pretty nice as opposed to something more constrained for space like you would expect, so losing access to them is not great but doesn’t seem like a rough deal — why the hell did you have so much room in the first place? You’re in space!
Live music — ironically missed a good chunk of Pile because I was in the bathroom but what I got was good, screamy hardcore hating on Stephen Miller. But I was there for McLusky, who of course whipped all kinds of ass. Old stuff and new stuff paced perfectly, some breathers but mostly tight furor with incredible energy, Damien Seyall on bass is a thrashing Yeti who is impossible not to get pumped up by. Andy Falkous remains the funniest dude in rock music, he has bad tinnitus so he plays with headphones and the drummer plays behind several panels of noise- and vibration- cancelling glass or plastic and at one point these actually fell over on the drums (the band played through it of course) and during repairs Falkous attributed the collapse to the crowd energy, “the Boston energy of guys wearing caps indoors.” Headshot on a third of the dudes there, hilarious. The tone was set with the opening banter:
Falkous: “Good evening Boston, we’re the Kings of Leon”
Guy in audience: “Play Use Somebody!”
Falkous: “Please do not be under the illusion this is a conversation.”
But if his sharpness is real so is his dedication to putting on a good show and his appreciation of the fact that the band can still do it to a jacked-up crowd. A great time out that absolutely nuked my ears, the drummer barrier got replaced on Falkous’ side of the stage but not the other and it made an immediate difference, I ultimately had to go stand off to the side for the rest of the show. Hopefully this does not affect seeing *checks notes* squalling psychedelic rock tonight!
But I was able to catch jazz guitarist Duke Robillard and his band at the pub the next night, part of the town’s ongoing jazz festival. Smooth and clear, the saxophonist and bassist had some nice runs, but the ear damage came from the dude next to me at the bar, who apparently ran into an old friend and had an extremely lengthy and loud conversation about “YOUNG GIRLS AND ITALIAN GUYS” and things of that nature. This is not as bad as it sounds, the friend was another person in her late 50s and he was talking about his many, many trips to the motherland, but boy did he have that Masshole foghorn bray going. Oh well, bar rules, if we were closer to where the band was playing I would’ve asked him to keep it quiet but he clearly did not have a volume switch and I think even if he tried he still would’ve hit full blast within two minutes of turning down. Live music, you win some you lose some.
The Music Man: My least generous reading is that The Music Man is a phony musical, the sentiments of a Fifties white guy looking back nostalgically and fondly on his 1910’s boyhood in a town full of ignorant, racist Midwesterners who probably led ten or twenty lynch mobs. My most generous is that this doesn’t matter because at the end, when that big red band uniform suddenly appears on Tommy and Zanetta gets one too, and a baton, chills went up my spine. It is pure movie magic, the beauty of a dream coming true. (Oh, and the songs are terrific. Few non-jazz American songs are as perfect as “Seventy-Six Trombones.”) Preston really got me this time around; he’s a con man, and yet he brings people together, not tearing them apart. (“I always believe in the band, kid.”) Director Morton DeCosta is adapting his original production, and while he makes the odd stagey or strange choice, like Shirley Jones’ wobbly POV of Preston, 9 times out of 10, he makes the right one, like that close-up of Harold Hill at Marion’s ear as he’s about to be arrested. (“Til there was you.”) I’m happy I went back to it, warts and all.
Slow Horses, “Cicada”
The flashbacks to Min’s protracted murder are brutal, and after sitting through all that, I’m not at all surprised Lamb forgoes offering the somewhat-culpable informant the protection he promised–which, in all likelihood, he could never have made good on without compromising his own secret op–and sets her up to order his takeout for him instead. Great line from him, re: Min–“Right now, I am going out of my way to avenge the death of Dickie Bough, a man I didn’t even like. So you can imagine what I’m gonna do to the person who murdered Min Harper, a man who I at least tolerated”–and he uses it well, persuading Louisa that getting justice for Min doesn’t hinge on her torturing Pashkin to death in the next few minutes.
Lamb and Shirley’s multiple-murder scene tour is a great setpiece, especially with it culminating in the radiation-cooked body; I too would put a bullet in my head rather than waiting for that process to finish.
River’s undercover glory–such as it is, although again, he’s got skills: planting his phone on Leo so Ho can track it was some quick thinking–comes to an ignominious end as he identifies the wrong sleeper agent, setting himself up to get tased in the neck because he discounts Alex as a threat.
Pillion
Interesting, well-crafted, sometimes quietly wrenching kinky gay romantic drama, where biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgaard) initiates shy, inexperienced Colin (Harry Melling) into a full-time BDSM relationship with, uh, let’s just say a minimum of actual communication. For a lot of the movie, it’s hard to tell if Colin is even specifically into this, or if he mostly just accepts Ray’s demands and restrictions–Colin does all the cooking, sleeps on the rug, never gets a kiss and only rarely gets affection–as the necessary cost of a relationship with one of the most attractive people to ever live (whom he’s increasingly besotted with). That’s a tension the movie doesn’t shy away from, but despite the questionable practices here, this is generally pro-kink, with part of Colin’s journey involving realizing–because Ray sure as fuck didn’t tell him–that even in this setting, it’s fine to have boundaries and desires of his own. (When he hears someone else in the scene say, “I wouldn’t put up with that,” you can see it occurring to him for the first time that that’s an option.) And Ray has feeling for Colin, too, but it’s implied that he loves control partly because he actually has less resilience: he finds it extremely hard to deal with emotionally risky situations, to an almost tragicomic degree. Funny in some places, sad in others, and generally well-done.
Hacks, “EGOT”
I wound up having time to watch this last night after all!
Bob Lipka’s smear campaign is a good, vicious, and plausible development, and this does somewhat resolve a quibble I had at the end of the last season about why Deb hadn’t been picking up at least some new fans from her Late Night last stand. It’s fascinating to see her back in a position she’s been in before–wronged by a man who’s been able to control the narrative to make her into a “bitches be crazy” joke–but one where she no longer has the time (her awareness of her own mortality here is poignantly tied up in her obsession with her legacy) or the inclination to take the same “lean into it” way out. The EGOT flailing is brief but hilarious, and then it’s a total “fuck yeah” moment to watch her and Ava team up to decide what she really wants to have define her career and boldly go after that.
And once again, no one tells Jimmy things until after he’s made big sacrifices to make their previous plans work! Phenomenal bit of Paul W. Downs in the good cop/bad cop scene in particular.
Cheyenne – Raoul Walsh western with a nice dose of mystery and some surprising twists. Gambler Dennis Morgan has a few minor offenses. He’s picked up and given the opportunity to forgo a prison sentence if he goes undercover to capture The Poet, a stagecoach robber with a penchant for poetry. Morgan feels like a poor man’s Flynn. Jane Wyman is no damsel and holds her own with a gun and some great lines. The movie is at its best whenever Arthur Kennedy as an insecure outlaw is on screen. It’s just above okay but may hold the record for most stagecoach robberies in a film. They are shot with Walsh’s usual panache for action.
What did we read?
Poetics, Aristotle
Grant essentially gets this all across over the course of his Shield writing, but it’s still a good reminder. There were two interesting points; the first was from the introduction, which explained that Aristotle’s surviving writing is actually, most likely, his notes or a personal work as opposed to the public works that made him famous in Greece, which was apparently written in a much neater and more efficient style.
The second is a point that Grant always expressed slightly differently, in that Aristotle makes a compelling case that tragic characters, paradoxically, have to be heroic (or, probably the better word is ‘sympathetic’) – as part of the mythmaking and for making an otherwise awful series of events watchable. His argument is essentially that if you want to watch awful people, write a comedy (he’d completely get Always Sunny and would get our general consensus that The Sopranos would be vastly improved cut down to a comedy).
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0870-0900, Brian Clevinger
“Dragging around his limp body will impede us less than when he does things.”
“That had not escaped me.”
“… Of course, leaving the body would be even better for us.”
“That had not escaped me.”
This section of the story has White Mage finally catch up to all the failing and turn evil, giving us the great jokes of a Good character trying to be Evil, as well as Fighter bringing one of his patented inconvenient piercing insights to bring it to an end.
“You know she could die if she drinks this.”
“The way I see it, the body takes a while to cool, so either way I get what I want.”
“That… may be the worst thing you’ve ever said.”
There’s a bit of a sense that Clevinger was, if not growing out of the comic’s humour, at least coming to a new perspective on it. These strips were produced six years after the first one, and a person can change immensely in that time. It reminds me of the way Always Sunny evolved, and how the characters being the worst people in Philadelphia gave the writers some leg-room in their characters’ awful behaviour, where the Gang are too cowardly to do anything really depraved but too stupid to function normally, and we watch them degrade.
What’s happening here isn’t quite the same thing, but there’s a sense of the punchlines changing a bit. I think that’s the thing about comedy – either you have to be really smart (look to The Simpsons or Futurama for various definitions of ‘smart’), or your characters have to be really dumb (interesting thing to consider with Aristotle’s advice on comedy up there). There’s also a spectacular gag where Black Mage accidentally makes Fighter a genius, and he’s so infuriated in general (due to Fighter ruining evil White Mage) that he ends up nearly fatally wounding him right when he’s about to be useful.
(Going back to Always Sunny, it matches up with the increased self-awareness of those characters in season five)
I think it’s partly that the comic foil takes on such a life of their own that the author (who would previously use them as a kind of avatar) comes to see their perspective as silly or mistaken in some way once you learn more about the world and about their limitations, but they’re still limited as a character. So you end up making jokes partly at your own previous self’s expense.
“What is it this time? Did Fighter say, do, or look at something?”
“It must take a tremendous amount of energy to be that unnecessarily creepy.”
There’s a small reveal that Thief is actually married and has been for hundreds of years. I kind of love this, especially six years into the comic, as a dumb reveal.
“Glurzkel, eh? I’ve never been there or heard of it before, but chances are I know exactly where it is!”
“Oh, do tell.”
“It’s in the world. Probably above ground, or failing that, under it.”
“What would we do without you, Red Mage?”
“Probably shrivel up and die.”
“I bet [Black Mage isn’t] in or near the only structure in view that’s still standing.”
“That does strike me as a little too smart for him, yeah.”
“Aristotle makes a compelling case that tragic characters, paradoxically, have to be heroic (or, probably the better word is ‘sympathetic’) – as part of the mythmaking and for making an otherwise awful series of events watchable” — this is something that MacBeth runs into as hard as it can, because our guy is not exactly heroic here and the sympathy lies in relating to the worst parts of human nature. I really love the examination of this in Slings and Arrows, where the second graders put on a version that is all violence and no tragedy and it actually kicks ass but has an emptiness that the main characters need to find a way to fill. But I think the emptiness is also the point of the play. In conclusion, Billy Shakes 1, Aristotle 0.
I think Patrick Stewart said Macbeth’s tragic flaw is really his strong imagination, he can picture himself as king and as a murderer before it ever happens, and understandably second graders can’t get this across to you.
I like this interpretation of MacBeth’s flaw, which definitely comes out in Throne Of Blood, and it points to his downfall in being unable to imagine the warnings against him coming true (and the larger consequences of his actions). Mifune running around like Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House — ALL IS WELL! WE WILL DEFEAT THE INVADERS! THERE IS NO BIRNAM WOOD *looks out window* OH FUCK
Driving through John Le Carre: The Biography by Adrian Symonds. And like many bios of creative types, the earlier works receive a lot more attention than the later ones, even though Le Carre’s post-Smiley work is about as popular and as well received as her his pre-Smiley work. I suspect once Symonds filled us in about how Le Carre/David Cornwell works, there was little to add. The bio parts are surprisingly compelling, the literary analysis seems to be pretty good (I haven’t read much Le Carre), and his asides about the adaptations are quite good. And as much as the author is a friend and admirer of his subject, he doesn’t cover up entirely Cornwell’s pettinesses, his treatment of women and friends, his darker side. There is a second work by Symonds that goes into great depth about Cornwell’s philandering but had to wait till after the death of the subject, but such things are peeking from undercover. Which seems appropriate.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Time to start reading some Le Carre, and this one is a good place to start. A very literate and cynical spy story, or maybe a literate novels about people who happen to be spies. It’s sometimes a bit convoluted, but overall it’s a quick and gripping read that builds suspense without an iota of action. I definitely need to read more by this author.
The other two Smileys — The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People — are different, Schoolboy in particular has more action and a ton more sprawl. It takes some getting used to but it’s very good. Smiley’s People might be the best, it is ruthless and honed despite being a decently-sized book, our man is back in detective mode and entering endgame. A Murder of Quality is really odd, a pre-Tinker Smiley in an almost Christie-ish murder story, it doesn’t quite work but has some excellent writing. And The Little Drummer Girl is fascinating, I think it too doesn’t quite work (there are three main characters and one is too much of a cipher) but the treatment of Israel/Palestine circa 1982 is as good as Le Carre can make it and like so many of his books, the real villain is sitting at home.
The others that sound interesting from Symonds’s write ups are A Small Town in Germany, A Perfect Spy (which might be a good companion to this book to see Ronnie Cornwell from his son’s PoV), and The Tailor of Panama (since I like Our Man in Havana very much).
And I so want to see Alec Guinness as Smiley but you cannot stream those legally in the US.
Oh Spy Who Came In From The Cold is also essential of course but man is that a brutal book. Smiley is a side character there and he appears to be not at the top of his game, he is actually the cruelest he’s ever been. Fun times! For post-Cold War stuff I’ve read The Constant Gardener, which has the problem of info-dumping in a way the other books do not but is worthwhile for the atmosphere and the mystery of a man who is sort of a blank investigating the cipher that was his wife.
LeCarre being a former spy himself might make his the most accurate spy novels as far as attitude, even if he still prefers drama over what a lot of spycraft is like (waiting around for shit to happen). Would also recommend Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends about Kim Philby if you haven’t read it – he’s who Tinker Tailor is based on and helped out LeCarre’s identity.
I’ve read a good chunk of McIntyre’s stuff, including that one. Very good book. (It’s fascinating that even after Philby was unmasked, he had friends who stood by him, including Graham Greene!) Let’s see them make a musical out of THAT!
Same, and one of them might have *let* him escape. I’d definitely watch a musical about Kim Philby.
I need to do a major Le Carre read after I’m done with my big Richard Stark read. Certainly bits of this novel are embedded in my memory for good, and watching Slow Horses has made me want to rewatch the movie, as well.
I’ve only watched the first three seasons of Slow Horses and haven’t read the books, but there is definitely Le Carre DNA in this show, even if Herron was setting out more to write an office satire set at MI5 than LeCarre but funnier. Jonathan Pryce is definitely crypto-Smiley.
The books are very good, “office satire set at MI5” is not inaccurate and the tone is not as inwardly cold and vicious as Le Carre but there’s still plenty of good intrigue. The big difference is action, Herron is superb at large action setpieces in a way Le Carre never bothered with.
Almost done with The Decameron and by god I’ll finish it! More thoughts next week.
Annihilation fucking rules, a cold, strange, eerie piece of horror/sci-fi that Ballardian in its exploration of an encroaching new environment, about to swallow us whole, and maybe that’s for the best. Post-human weird fiction.
The Lake of Darkness, by Ruth Rendell
In one of his Believer columns, Nick Hornby mentions that, since reading is now a much less popular pastime, it’s common to market books as “if you only read one book this year, make it this one,” and that part of the appeal of older works is that they were written fully expecting that you’d read multiple books, and so any individual work could often be more specific and peculiar, since it wasn’t aiming to drag in absolutely everyone and scratch every possible itch. Rendell, one of my all-time favorite suspense writers, lives up to that here with this strange, chilly novel that explores the fascinating but not exactly universally beloved question, “What if you were condescending and repressed, and it ruined your whole fucking life?”
Martin Urban is a posh young man who, aided by a betting slate he gets from his friend Tim (a struggling journalist who Martin is absolutely not incredibly attracted to), wins over a hundred thousand pounds in the football pools. He wants to give half of it away to various deserving candidates, mostly to help them with London housing costs, and he wants to do it as a set of extravagant personal donations; getting to enjoy the recipients’ gratitude is part of the appeal. He also knows he should give something to Tim, but in the end–with all that repressed sexuality coming into play–he can’t make himself do it. The strangers are safer, except nothing goes according to plan at all, because most of the candidates are baffled and/or suspicious. Then Martin falls in love with a young woman who works at a flower shop, and that isn’t going well either, though for a long time, he has no idea just how badly it’s going. Developing in parallel to all this is the story of the somewhat-psychotic Finn, who dreamily takes on the odd murder for hire, and the way the two eventually intersect is satisfying and brutal.
It’s hard to summarize this neatly, but it’s full of doom, sharply astute psychological observations, and deft character work, and it has a surprising amount of narrative propulsion, to the point where I kept pausing when reading it to catch my wife up on everything that was happening.
The Handle, by Richard Stark
Parker takes on a job that’s unusual even for him: it’s funded by the Outfit (who keep interfering more than he would like) and closely monitored by federal law enforcement (who need to be ditched and/or managed for most of the book). It’s also somehow even flashier than robbing a whole town, since it involves knocking over a remote island casino (owned by a former Nazi) and destroying island’s infrastructure in the process. As the great Westlake Review blog points out, it’s a bit “Parker does James Bond.”
But if there’s some fun homage/satire going on in terms of essential setup, this is still all Stark in execution, from how Salsa meets his end (unceremoniously but well, at least on his part: he dies a professional, even if Baron doesn’t kill him like one) to the plot wrinkles that come from underestimating various players (Heenan’s spiteful return; Baron’s biter bit death in the Mexican desert). And my boy Grofield is back! He gets a major chunk of the narrative here, since his own spinoff series is pending, and that includes some of the best bits, like him stowing his bleeding, close-to-death self away in a Murphy bed. We get a little bit more of his rapport with Parker in this volume, with Parker’s unsentimental professional loyalty extending a touch further than it did even with Handy McKay, though still within the bounds of what feels real for him.
One of the best Parker-specific details here is how Stark sets up a good potential hook–if Parker doesn’t net what he should from the robbery, the Outfit will pay out the difference–and then deliberately has Parker abandon it, deciding at the end that although the total isn’t quite what it should be, his own share shaking out about right after the deaths makes up for it. Usually, I’d say it’s unsatisfying to set up a narrative thread and then tie it off before it intersects with anything else. Here, it completely works, because it emphasizes Parker’s control. He’s independent enough to not follow anything he doesn’t want to, even general storytelling rules. He makes the choice he would make, and that makes it feel right.
Holy shit that Rendell sounds great. A Judgement In Stone still sits in my mind a year later, “what if this unlikable character did something awful” is a great story when someone like Rendell is at the helm.
And the Westlake Review is a great blog, the author can get a bit weird at times but he does superb research and draws lots of great connections across the larger oeuvre, I had never thought of the Bond one here but it makes perfect sense. And narrative thread-wise I think he also points out how that meddling Outfit blowhard disappears from the back half of the book in an odd way, he’s given enough time early on to suggest more to come (likely a ruthless disposal) but that doesn’t pan out. Maybe because so much else is going on, the heist/attack owns and the flight into Mexico is also great, the Baron is another one of Stark’s villains that is tougher and smarter than the reader might expect. But not smart enough, massive laugh at his end, which is the least Bond villain exit imaginable.
I think this is one of the Parkers that would be best adapted to a film, “mob hires crook to rob Nazi island” is a plot that can stand on its own with a non-Parker lead, especially because Grofield is also there. Why the fuck did Shane Black not just do that.
A Judgement in Stone was the first one I ever read! A killer place to start.
Great point about the movie potential here, and Shane Black could have totally stripped it for parts and made his Grofield and his non-Parker lead exactly the kind of duo he does so well. And yet!
I assume the Westlake Review comments were where I read the encapsulation of Menlo from The Mourner as being a film role written for Peter Lorre but cast with Sydney Greenstreet, I can’t imagine that I came up with that on my own.
The Handle might have been the first Parker book that I tried after The Hunter. Didn’t get deep into it, but I remember loving the bracing pragmatism in walking away from the local thieves at the end. Killing them can only cause Parker problems and doesn’t get him his money, so why bother?
“Parker reaches detente with the Outfit” is a fascinating development that doesn’t so much alter the status quo as just allow for the occasional 0interesting story possibility that “war with the Outfit” wouldn’t. And this is about as close as Westlake gets to “‘let’s root for Parker because the bad guy is THAT bad.” Oh, Parker never seems to rob anyone who can’t afford it and sometmes from some real jerks, but we in general aren’t here for any sort of morality play. OTOH, robbing from schmucks is very much part of the fun in the Dortmunder books. And Dortmunder is only four years away by now.
“Parker never seems to rob anyone who can’t afford it” is such a great bit of pragmatic character — why would he? They don’t have much money anyway. Every once in a while he’ll hit someone who doesn’t “deserve” it but only when he’s really down and out — the beginning of The Hunter and the opening of Flashfire come to mind — but it’s only out of necessity, not indifferent sociopathy. And the flip side of this is that Parker would not give a shit about the Baron, an objectively bad dude, if the scheme was not dropped in his lap — even as a guy always scoping out potential targets he would surely leave the island alone unless he had all the schematics.
EDIT: And this detente with the Outfit only lasts so long, in any case…
I really like how Stark’s Outfit is stripped of all Mob romance, so to speak–there’s some lingering caution in how they deal with him, now that they know what he can do, but there’s no lingering resentment, because the new boss had no real loyalty to the old boss (and in fact, Parker’s actions helped bring him to power, so he’s good). It leads to a kind of complex respect–on their part, not so much on his–that, like you said, has good story potential. They’ve learned what he can do and how to work with him.
The Destruction Of The Temple by Barry Malzberg – In the distant, post-apoc future NYC has been walled off containing the “lumpen” social class and a small, privileged class in charge of their imprisonment. A sociology student gets funding to reenact the JFK assassination with local actors to finish his degree. Things go wrong when he is kidnapped by the “lumpen” class and forced to Quantum Leap through the political violence of the late twentieth century, including experiencing 11/22/63, as JFK, again and again. This is a fragmented, strange and angry novel Malzberg uses to examine the biography of America in the late twentieth century – Jim Crow, Malcom X, JFK, race riots, government corruption, consumerism and the freedom of the automobile. Realizing the full meaning of the title is a bucket of water to the face.
Year of the Month update!
Next month, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1949.
April. 9th: Cori Domschot: I Was a Male War Bride
Apr. 13th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Apr. 16th: Cori Domschot: On the Town
Apr. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Confessions of a Mask
Apr. 27th: Tristan J. Nankervis: 1984
And in May, we’ll be opening the doors for your writing on any movies, albums, books, etc. from 2014!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Earth to Echo
TBD: Cori Domschot: Jack Ryan
TBD: Ben Hohenstatt: Plowing Into the Field of Love