Glen Hirshberg's Blog, page 10
July 11, 2014
Epistles from Readercon 2014
Highlights of Readercon Day 2: too many to list, actually. Talking situations you don't want to be in in places you never want to leave on the teaching-ghost-story-writing panel with Michael Dirda and Gemma Files and Jack M. Haringa and Erik Amundsen. Getting to chat Holocaust ghost stories and digital piracy and Weird Wisconsin with Mary Rickert and Rebecca Brown and the delightful Craig D.B. Patton (thanks for driving all the way up just for this, Craig) at a "Kaffeeklatsch," Hearing Paul Tremblay read the least erotic thing I've ever heard about tongues. Watching Gemma deliver a Sumerian curse at the end of her reading, glance up, and offer the least reassuring grin this side of Paul Tremblay's. John Langan stopping smiling just long enough to close the Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Horror reading...fearfully. Meeting the lovely Chizine people (even if they didn't actually pay for dinner). Stopping by the t-shirt shop to get my Michael KellySimon StrantzasIan Rogers boy-band
top made for my Toronto readings next week (just wanted to see if you were paying attention, gents; would it be better if I said it was Michael Rowe's idea?). Michael Cisco hurling himself into a startlingly funny performance of a typically literate, challenging, beautiful new blizzard of language about (un)language. Delightful Thai dinner
(far, far from the hotel with and its carefully crafted mass starvation-diet experiment). My books selling out less than an hour after the dealer room opened (which, yeah, could be read one of two ways, but I'm choosing the upbeat one).
Lowlight: The return from the Thai restaurant to the hotel. In Paul Tremblay's trunk.
Photo of that, sadly, to follow...
top made for my Toronto readings next week (just wanted to see if you were paying attention, gents; would it be better if I said it was Michael Rowe's idea?). Michael Cisco hurling himself into a startlingly funny performance of a typically literate, challenging, beautiful new blizzard of language about (un)language. Delightful Thai dinner
(far, far from the hotel with and its carefully crafted mass starvation-diet experiment). My books selling out less than an hour after the dealer room opened (which, yeah, could be read one of two ways, but I'm choosing the upbeat one).
Lowlight: The return from the Thai restaurant to the hotel. In Paul Tremblay's trunk.
Photo of that, sadly, to follow...
The Music of Motherless Child
I've contributed the Book Notes column today at
Largehearted Boy
,
writing about the music that powers the characters in (and the writing of) Motherless Child . Here is a snippet from that piece:
Warren Smith - "Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache"
This is the song Natalie and Sophie hear the Whistler play on the night he seduces and alters them. The Whistler is indeed a master musician, a mimic, an artist in the George Jones mold, drawing relentlessly on explosive emotions he sees people feeling but can't seem to experience himself. As for the song, it seemed the right one here for several reasons: it's got that melody, that rhythm, first of all, so sweet and scary at the same time. When Warren Smith's jilted lover sings, "Who you been lovin' since I've been gone/A long tall man with a red coat on," I both hear his heartache and find myself more than a little afraid, maybe for the singer, but just as much for the red-coated stranger, and most of all for the woman. There's a sort of love in this music. But there's also a primal, barely acknowledged fury.
Chuck Berry - "Memphis Tennessee"
The greatest midnight phone-call in the history of rock music isn't to a lover, but a daughter, and so inevitably surfaces in Natalie's thoughts as she tries, and fails, repeatedly, to accept the fact that her son is no longer with her. Natalie is the more grounded, more thoughtful, and moodier of these two lost women, Sophie her sunnier, lighthearted opposite, but both of them are applying the considerable force of their respective personalities to coming to terms with their grief. Natalie wants "to feel, yet again, the full force of the emptiness there, where her child had been. To know it was permanent. She needed to know that, if she hoped to go on. If she did." So this is what she sings. And as with "Red Cadillac," there's a magic in the melody itself that doesn't so much mask the grim subject matter as bathe it in beautiful, almost alluring light. Which, again, makes it terrifying to me.
Read the full article here-->
Stream the playlist at Spotify-->
writing about the music that powers the characters in (and the writing of) Motherless Child . Here is a snippet from that piece:
Warren Smith - "Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache"
This is the song Natalie and Sophie hear the Whistler play on the night he seduces and alters them. The Whistler is indeed a master musician, a mimic, an artist in the George Jones mold, drawing relentlessly on explosive emotions he sees people feeling but can't seem to experience himself. As for the song, it seemed the right one here for several reasons: it's got that melody, that rhythm, first of all, so sweet and scary at the same time. When Warren Smith's jilted lover sings, "Who you been lovin' since I've been gone/A long tall man with a red coat on," I both hear his heartache and find myself more than a little afraid, maybe for the singer, but just as much for the red-coated stranger, and most of all for the woman. There's a sort of love in this music. But there's also a primal, barely acknowledged fury.
Chuck Berry - "Memphis Tennessee"
The greatest midnight phone-call in the history of rock music isn't to a lover, but a daughter, and so inevitably surfaces in Natalie's thoughts as she tries, and fails, repeatedly, to accept the fact that her son is no longer with her. Natalie is the more grounded, more thoughtful, and moodier of these two lost women, Sophie her sunnier, lighthearted opposite, but both of them are applying the considerable force of their respective personalities to coming to terms with their grief. Natalie wants "to feel, yet again, the full force of the emptiness there, where her child had been. To know it was permanent. She needed to know that, if she hoped to go on. If she did." So this is what she sings. And as with "Red Cadillac," there's a magic in the melody itself that doesn't so much mask the grim subject matter as bathe it in beautiful, almost alluring light. Which, again, makes it terrifying to me.
Read the full article here-->
Stream the playlist at Spotify-->
Epistles from Readercon 2014
Talking Lustmord with Mike Griffin and Lovecraft with John Langan,
Snowpiercer
and the attempted appropriation of Mary Shelley
with Sean Moreland and Ranylt Richildis and Nicole Cushing, Belgian white and teaching high school while writing with Paul Tremblay, bad power cords and good bad vampires with Michael Rowe and Gemma Files, Berberian Sound Studio
and Robert Aickman with Peter Straub, cats and moms with Ellen Datlow, La Jetée and the verticality of film with John Clute. And then one of those conversations that just keep unspooling, about writing, not collecting injustices, dead friends, living stories, getting lost, going wandering with Elizabeth Hand. Not an unpleasant warm-up day. Off to teach some teaching of ghost story writing today...
with Sean Moreland and Ranylt Richildis and Nicole Cushing, Belgian white and teaching high school while writing with Paul Tremblay, bad power cords and good bad vampires with Michael Rowe and Gemma Files, Berberian Sound Studio
and Robert Aickman with Peter Straub, cats and moms with Ellen Datlow, La Jetée and the verticality of film with John Clute. And then one of those conversations that just keep unspooling, about writing, not collecting injustices, dead friends, living stories, getting lost, going wandering with Elizabeth Hand. Not an unpleasant warm-up day. Off to teach some teaching of ghost story writing today...
July 10, 2014
Interview by Brian Lillie
Brian Lillie, who played a CRUCIAL role in helping me set up my Ann Arbor gig on July 21st, has conducted an interview with me. Asked me some smart, good questions, too (so thanks yet again, Brian). I've posted the whole interview below:
Acclaimed horror author Glen Hirshberg coming to Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore July 21st, 7:00 pm
July 10, 2014 at 10:02am
Glen Hirshberg , celebrated author of ‘spectral fiction’, is coming to Literati bookstore in Ann Arbor on July 21st to read from his acclaimed novel Motherless Child , recently published by Tor Books.
The Los Angeles Times Review of Books wrote about Motherless Child : “Always one of his generation’s finest stylists, its most able students of character, [Hirshberg] has written one of the best books of the year”. Its many other accolades include starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, as well as praise from such genre stalwarts as Locus, Black Static, Cemetery Dance, and Fangoria.
Glen was kind enough to answer a few questions about growing up in Detroit, the genesis of Motherless Child , the importance of music in his life, and the infamous Rolling Dark Revue…
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your connection to Detroit?
GH: I grew up in suburban Detroit; my family left for the west coast just before my 14th birthday. Not only have I always considered myself a Detroiter--and been grateful that I spent my key formative years there instead of in California--but I think the city continues to color everything I write.
Detroit's tragedies and its resilience, its magnificent, messy mix of cultures and peoples and classes, its industrial-colored skies and its lakes, its subcultures springing up, constantly amid the ruins...it's not just my kind of place. It's still me.
Q: Your new novel Motherless Child is a vampire tale that is as much an ode to motherhood and friendship as it is a scary-as-hell horror novel. What were the threads that led you to write this book?
GH: To be honest, I never thought I'd write a vampire story. In fact, I was determined not to. But those two women at the heart of the novel, Natalie and Sophie, waltzed into my head one day and started chattering. And given that my father was part of the team that DESIGNED the original GTO, I think I was pretty much fated to try a proper road novel, sooner or later (although, honestly, ALL of my novels have been road novels of one sort or another).
Those things, plus my experiences living in the South, plus a nagging sense that people have been getting too comfortable with monsters, losing track of the fact that they ARE monsters... I think those all blended together over time, and one day, Motherless Child just started spilling out.
Q: Motherless Child is chockfull of music, both in the actual story and in the characters’ lives. What can you say about the importance of music in your own life and writing?
GH: I've been a passionate music junkie all my life. My first professional writing gig was as a critic in Seattle, right as that whole scene broke. My dad had a hit single in 1957. I still have a band.
But until Motherless Child , music hadn't played so central a role in my fiction. Pretty early, though, I realized how important music would be both to Natalie (the heroine) and the Whistler (arguably the most monstrous of the book's monsters). After that, I just started having fun. From the "Da Doo Ron Ron" riff in the novel's first lines ("She met him on a Monday. Her heart stood still. At the time, she thought his did, too. Of course, she turned out to be right about that") on down. I sang this book as much as wrote it.
Q: You are known for your live readings, including the infamous Rolling Dark Revue. What can people expect at your Literati reading?
GH: I wish I could bring the whole Rolling Dark experience to Ann Arbor. The RDR was originally dreamed up by the great Dennis Etchison, screenwriter/novelist Peter Atkins, and me over endless Big Boys and conversation at the Bob's in Burbank. We were lamenting how NOT fun most readings tend to be. So, after too many discussions about what we could do to make them better...we set out to make them better.
Dennis retired pretty early on, but Pete and I have developed the thing into an annual event that tours the west coast every fall, and has also done some international dates. Essentially, we drape a framing play (usually featuring a scenario that ends with Pete and I dying, every single year) around three ghost story readings. Our 10th Anniversary show is coming up.
My Literati reading will probably be more of a straight-up reading (the horror bluegrass band we were shooting for couldn't make it). I can only promise that I've at least honed my skills over years of performing. I'll bring what I've got. Maybe I'll even sing.
LITERATI BOOKSTORE is located at 124 E. Washington Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. For more information: 734-585-5567, info@literatibookstore.com
Click to read and share this interview on facebook-->
Jerry Hirshberg's book.
The New York Times on my dad, Jerry Hirshberg,
Acclaimed horror author Glen Hirshberg coming to Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore July 21st, 7:00 pm
July 10, 2014 at 10:02am
Glen Hirshberg , celebrated author of ‘spectral fiction’, is coming to Literati bookstore in Ann Arbor on July 21st to read from his acclaimed novel Motherless Child , recently published by Tor Books.
The Los Angeles Times Review of Books wrote about Motherless Child : “Always one of his generation’s finest stylists, its most able students of character, [Hirshberg] has written one of the best books of the year”. Its many other accolades include starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, as well as praise from such genre stalwarts as Locus, Black Static, Cemetery Dance, and Fangoria.
Glen was kind enough to answer a few questions about growing up in Detroit, the genesis of Motherless Child , the importance of music in his life, and the infamous Rolling Dark Revue…
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your connection to Detroit?
GH: I grew up in suburban Detroit; my family left for the west coast just before my 14th birthday. Not only have I always considered myself a Detroiter--and been grateful that I spent my key formative years there instead of in California--but I think the city continues to color everything I write.
Detroit's tragedies and its resilience, its magnificent, messy mix of cultures and peoples and classes, its industrial-colored skies and its lakes, its subcultures springing up, constantly amid the ruins...it's not just my kind of place. It's still me.
Q: Your new novel Motherless Child is a vampire tale that is as much an ode to motherhood and friendship as it is a scary-as-hell horror novel. What were the threads that led you to write this book?
GH: To be honest, I never thought I'd write a vampire story. In fact, I was determined not to. But those two women at the heart of the novel, Natalie and Sophie, waltzed into my head one day and started chattering. And given that my father was part of the team that DESIGNED the original GTO, I think I was pretty much fated to try a proper road novel, sooner or later (although, honestly, ALL of my novels have been road novels of one sort or another).
Those things, plus my experiences living in the South, plus a nagging sense that people have been getting too comfortable with monsters, losing track of the fact that they ARE monsters... I think those all blended together over time, and one day, Motherless Child just started spilling out.
Q: Motherless Child is chockfull of music, both in the actual story and in the characters’ lives. What can you say about the importance of music in your own life and writing?
GH: I've been a passionate music junkie all my life. My first professional writing gig was as a critic in Seattle, right as that whole scene broke. My dad had a hit single in 1957. I still have a band.
But until Motherless Child , music hadn't played so central a role in my fiction. Pretty early, though, I realized how important music would be both to Natalie (the heroine) and the Whistler (arguably the most monstrous of the book's monsters). After that, I just started having fun. From the "Da Doo Ron Ron" riff in the novel's first lines ("She met him on a Monday. Her heart stood still. At the time, she thought his did, too. Of course, she turned out to be right about that") on down. I sang this book as much as wrote it.
Q: You are known for your live readings, including the infamous Rolling Dark Revue. What can people expect at your Literati reading?
GH: I wish I could bring the whole Rolling Dark experience to Ann Arbor. The RDR was originally dreamed up by the great Dennis Etchison, screenwriter/novelist Peter Atkins, and me over endless Big Boys and conversation at the Bob's in Burbank. We were lamenting how NOT fun most readings tend to be. So, after too many discussions about what we could do to make them better...we set out to make them better.
Dennis retired pretty early on, but Pete and I have developed the thing into an annual event that tours the west coast every fall, and has also done some international dates. Essentially, we drape a framing play (usually featuring a scenario that ends with Pete and I dying, every single year) around three ghost story readings. Our 10th Anniversary show is coming up.
My Literati reading will probably be more of a straight-up reading (the horror bluegrass band we were shooting for couldn't make it). I can only promise that I've at least honed my skills over years of performing. I'll bring what I've got. Maybe I'll even sing.
LITERATI BOOKSTORE is located at 124 E. Washington Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. For more information: 734-585-5567, info@literatibookstore.com
Click to read and share this interview on facebook-->
Jerry Hirshberg's book.
The New York Times on my dad, Jerry Hirshberg,
World Fantasy Nominations
Delighted to see that Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters: Stories and Richard Bowes' Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, easily two of the best books I read last year, have been both rewarded with World Fantasy Award nominations. Congratulations to them, to Ellen Datlow for the Lifetime Achievement Award she obviously deserves, and to all the other nominees.
On the Way to Readercon
You know that scene in the book HANNIBAL--the one Martin Amis so rightly pegged as the exact point where Thomas Harris lost track of the rest of us, because suddenly he assumed we were sympathizing WITH the serial killer?--where Lecter is on a plane, and a single mom sits down in the seat next to him with her kid, and commences continually checking the kid's diaper (ultimately by plunging in a finger)? And we're supposed to be grossed out BY THE MOM?
I...I think I maybe understand that moment a little better now. Or else I've become Lecter. Or...
See, given the nature of my life, the wall-to-wall parenting-teaching-writing-doing, I spend at least twice as long as any plane trip I'm going to take will actually take on picking what I'm going to read on that trip. It's a little, rare ritual. a tiny gift of four or five straight, almost unimaginable hours. A mirage in my world. A treasured one.
Yesterday, on the flight to Readercon, I hadn't even gotten my ripped little backpack open before He came.
Yes, He was...big. Flowed majestically over armrests. But he's allowed. On the other hand, I'd like to have asked him--if, you know, I'd been able to get a word in, at any point--whether he really couldn't feel, didn't notice, that the point of his elbow had found a spot pretty much dead center in my chest, just right of my heart, pinning me upright in my seat as though with the spike of an iron maiden, or just thought that's where elbows belonged.
I'd also brought a wrap for lunch. Tuna, I think. I can't say, because I can't remember, because as He and his elbow were getting themselves settled, he looked down, noted my just unwrapped wrap, and said, "Hey, that looks good, what is it?" And then stuck his finger under the wrappy part, into the tuna, to see.
Then he commenced speaking.
I will not repeat the conversation. Sorry, lecture. I literally am not sure I spoke beyond "Uh, well--" before the elbow issued a warning dig--suggested that I might break the fellow's flow--and silenced me again.
I think my favorite bit was when he leaned over to the guy on the other side of him, who'd been watching the Netherlands-Argentina penalty shootout, and asked the score. The guy glanced up very briefly, answered in German. Lifted his hands in apparent incomprehension.
I guess that guy picked up English during the game, as he was having a lovely phone conversation with his wife at the baggage claim a few hours later. When he saw me staring--rubbing the sore spot in my chest--he gave me a single, sheepish, proud-of-his-not-German-self smile...
I...I think I maybe understand that moment a little better now. Or else I've become Lecter. Or...
See, given the nature of my life, the wall-to-wall parenting-teaching-writing-doing, I spend at least twice as long as any plane trip I'm going to take will actually take on picking what I'm going to read on that trip. It's a little, rare ritual. a tiny gift of four or five straight, almost unimaginable hours. A mirage in my world. A treasured one.
Yesterday, on the flight to Readercon, I hadn't even gotten my ripped little backpack open before He came.
Yes, He was...big. Flowed majestically over armrests. But he's allowed. On the other hand, I'd like to have asked him--if, you know, I'd been able to get a word in, at any point--whether he really couldn't feel, didn't notice, that the point of his elbow had found a spot pretty much dead center in my chest, just right of my heart, pinning me upright in my seat as though with the spike of an iron maiden, or just thought that's where elbows belonged.
I'd also brought a wrap for lunch. Tuna, I think. I can't say, because I can't remember, because as He and his elbow were getting themselves settled, he looked down, noted my just unwrapped wrap, and said, "Hey, that looks good, what is it?" And then stuck his finger under the wrappy part, into the tuna, to see.
Then he commenced speaking.
I will not repeat the conversation. Sorry, lecture. I literally am not sure I spoke beyond "Uh, well--" before the elbow issued a warning dig--suggested that I might break the fellow's flow--and silenced me again.
I think my favorite bit was when he leaned over to the guy on the other side of him, who'd been watching the Netherlands-Argentina penalty shootout, and asked the score. The guy glanced up very briefly, answered in German. Lifted his hands in apparent incomprehension.
I guess that guy picked up English during the game, as he was having a lovely phone conversation with his wife at the baggage claim a few hours later. When he saw me staring--rubbing the sore spot in my chest--he gave me a single, sheepish, proud-of-his-not-German-self smile...
July 8, 2014
Review of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno
T.R.U.E., Week of 7/8, Post #3
David Sheppard-- On Some Faraway Beach
Way back in my last life (or the one before), when I was a cheeky, snotty, solitary rock music critic in Seattle, I was talking to my favorite band in town, The Walkabouts. In part, I'll admit, they were my favorite because everyone else loved Nirvana (me, too) Soundgarden, the Melvins,and Mudhoney (me, those last three, not so much). In part because they wrote a sort of literate, doomy folk-rock that went down just right with November rain over the Sound, and had penned at least a couple near-classics I still say are worth rediscovering, even if the band eventually got self-conscious and relocated to Germany, where they're still beloved.
One night, I ran into Chris Eckman, their singer/guitarist/co-leader. He was so wired, he seemed to have sprung another few inches on his already towering, reedy frame. "Brian Eno just played on our record," he told me.
And that got me so excited, I think I, too, got taller. Don't laugh, you who know (and look down) on me. You didn't know how hobbity I was THEN.
I asked Chris how it had happened.
"He was in the studio next door," Chris said, "and he heard us playing 'Train to Mercy.'" (That, by the way, is one of those songs you all should hear someday). "And he just walked into our studio, and said, 'Let me show you something.' And he went to the keyboard while the song played back. And he just...held down a C. Then, after a while, he added a high E.' Then he said, 'See?' Just do that. But what he'd done was so perfect--it just FILLED the song, just enough...made it BREATHE or something...we asked if we could keep the part he'd just played. He shrugged and left."
That story isn't in David Sheppard's superb and fair-minded On Some Faraway Beach. But there are a thousand others like it. Brian lulling and nagging Robert Fripp into the most majestic,emotionally engaged solos of his long, combative career. Brian yoking a cantankerous, coked-out John Cale to his songs for some of the best records of THAT career. Brian helping Bryan invent Roxy Music, without knowing how to do anything on a musical instrument except loop and smear it with tape decks and a primitive synthesizer. Brian dreaming up ambient music after getting hit by a car.
Gavin Bryars, who has composed two of the most lasting pieces in the contemporary classical music canon--both while he was working somewhere in the vicinity of Eno--contends, in Sheppard's book, that Eno's actual art can only be classified as disappointing, that his ideas are always better than the music that springs from them.
That might be fair. There are Eno records I adore--"Another Green World," "Taking Tiger Mountain...", "Before and After Science," "Discreet Music" (side one, anyway), the 2nd and 4th Ambient releases. But there are lots more Eno productions, things he's touched, that I love than things that bear his name.
As a matter of fact, I'm not sure any one human being has factored in more of the non-literary creative work I love than Brian Eno. In one way or another. And if the majority of his recorded output, like John Cage's, eventually fades, and if his greatest gift has been bringing wild or abstract ideas (only some of them his) to bear on accessible art, he has consistently managed to make the art I love into greater art.
No one I've ever known has played a Middle C better.
David Sheppard-- On Some Faraway Beach
Way back in my last life (or the one before), when I was a cheeky, snotty, solitary rock music critic in Seattle, I was talking to my favorite band in town, The Walkabouts. In part, I'll admit, they were my favorite because everyone else loved Nirvana (me, too) Soundgarden, the Melvins,and Mudhoney (me, those last three, not so much). In part because they wrote a sort of literate, doomy folk-rock that went down just right with November rain over the Sound, and had penned at least a couple near-classics I still say are worth rediscovering, even if the band eventually got self-conscious and relocated to Germany, where they're still beloved.
One night, I ran into Chris Eckman, their singer/guitarist/co-leader. He was so wired, he seemed to have sprung another few inches on his already towering, reedy frame. "Brian Eno just played on our record," he told me.
And that got me so excited, I think I, too, got taller. Don't laugh, you who know (and look down) on me. You didn't know how hobbity I was THEN.
I asked Chris how it had happened.
"He was in the studio next door," Chris said, "and he heard us playing 'Train to Mercy.'" (That, by the way, is one of those songs you all should hear someday). "And he just walked into our studio, and said, 'Let me show you something.' And he went to the keyboard while the song played back. And he just...held down a C. Then, after a while, he added a high E.' Then he said, 'See?' Just do that. But what he'd done was so perfect--it just FILLED the song, just enough...made it BREATHE or something...we asked if we could keep the part he'd just played. He shrugged and left."
That story isn't in David Sheppard's superb and fair-minded On Some Faraway Beach. But there are a thousand others like it. Brian lulling and nagging Robert Fripp into the most majestic,emotionally engaged solos of his long, combative career. Brian yoking a cantankerous, coked-out John Cale to his songs for some of the best records of THAT career. Brian helping Bryan invent Roxy Music, without knowing how to do anything on a musical instrument except loop and smear it with tape decks and a primitive synthesizer. Brian dreaming up ambient music after getting hit by a car.
Gavin Bryars, who has composed two of the most lasting pieces in the contemporary classical music canon--both while he was working somewhere in the vicinity of Eno--contends, in Sheppard's book, that Eno's actual art can only be classified as disappointing, that his ideas are always better than the music that springs from them.
That might be fair. There are Eno records I adore--"Another Green World," "Taking Tiger Mountain...", "Before and After Science," "Discreet Music" (side one, anyway), the 2nd and 4th Ambient releases. But there are lots more Eno productions, things he's touched, that I love than things that bear his name.
As a matter of fact, I'm not sure any one human being has factored in more of the non-literary creative work I love than Brian Eno. In one way or another. And if the majority of his recorded output, like John Cage's, eventually fades, and if his greatest gift has been bringing wild or abstract ideas (only some of them his) to bear on accessible art, he has consistently managed to make the art I love into greater art.
No one I've ever known has played a Middle C better.
Movie Review: Snowpiercer
T.R.U.E., Week of 7/8/ Post #2
Snowpiercer
Took me maybe ten minutes. I think, in part, because of the CGI. A train movie without a train? Without actual train sound? I mean, of all the great analog experiences over on this side of the Oculus Rift, riding the rails has to rate right up there with slipping a needle into a record groove. Or kissing someone.
Also, the post-apocalyptic thing has got to be the most played out genre by now except maybe for vampire fiction (hey, wait a minute...)
Also, with these class-metaphor sci-fi films like the wildly overrated District 9 , the allegory tends to be so heavy-handed, and this one is no exception, and yeah, the world really seems to be tilting that way, but...
Then, all of a sudden, I was all in. All aboard. If I had my way, I'd be riding, still.
A man-made effort to curb global warming results in a cataclysm, freezing the entire planet and extinguishing all life except the few hundred souls lucky enough to scramble on board the titular train, which boasts a perpetually rechargeable engine, and which commences endlessly circling Europe. Theoretically, forever.
The wealthy enjoy the luxurious appointments and accommodations up front, dine on steaks and fresh produce grown in the atrium. The lower classes get mashed together, stacked in impossibly small bunks in filthy quarters in the back. They eat black, gelatinous protein cubes. Several times previously, the poor have rebelled, attempted to smash through through to the front car. The next revolution, everyone senses, will be the last. One way or another.
So many things work in this dazzling, devastating, riveting movie. Even the CGI train does, somehow, cast that trainspell, eventually. Lulls and chatters you into this world. What seems another obvious, one-track plot keeps shunting sideways, darting down unexpected branch lines. There are several stunning reveals that are completely set up, laid like track right in front of us. But the brutal fighting and the bizarre characters and surprisingly playful steampunk design flourishes keep distracting, and so we keep getting surprised.
A couple moments here are all-timers, will be shown on reels at ceremonies 50 years from now. Most of all, I suspect, the New Year's celebration, which occurs every time the train reaches and crosses the Yekaterina Bridge.
I have no idea what Tilda Swinton thinks she was doing, but she was having a blast doing it, and I had a blast watching her.
And though the action is blunt and bruising (and fun, despite the fact that we are never allowed to forget that these are actual people being hurt), the thinking is surprisingly subtle. As in the idea that in a denuded, devastated, crushingly overpopulated world-in-microcosm, the rich man's greatest luxury is going to be solitude.
Snowpiercer
Took me maybe ten minutes. I think, in part, because of the CGI. A train movie without a train? Without actual train sound? I mean, of all the great analog experiences over on this side of the Oculus Rift, riding the rails has to rate right up there with slipping a needle into a record groove. Or kissing someone.
Also, the post-apocalyptic thing has got to be the most played out genre by now except maybe for vampire fiction (hey, wait a minute...)
Also, with these class-metaphor sci-fi films like the wildly overrated District 9 , the allegory tends to be so heavy-handed, and this one is no exception, and yeah, the world really seems to be tilting that way, but...
Then, all of a sudden, I was all in. All aboard. If I had my way, I'd be riding, still.
A man-made effort to curb global warming results in a cataclysm, freezing the entire planet and extinguishing all life except the few hundred souls lucky enough to scramble on board the titular train, which boasts a perpetually rechargeable engine, and which commences endlessly circling Europe. Theoretically, forever.
The wealthy enjoy the luxurious appointments and accommodations up front, dine on steaks and fresh produce grown in the atrium. The lower classes get mashed together, stacked in impossibly small bunks in filthy quarters in the back. They eat black, gelatinous protein cubes. Several times previously, the poor have rebelled, attempted to smash through through to the front car. The next revolution, everyone senses, will be the last. One way or another.
So many things work in this dazzling, devastating, riveting movie. Even the CGI train does, somehow, cast that trainspell, eventually. Lulls and chatters you into this world. What seems another obvious, one-track plot keeps shunting sideways, darting down unexpected branch lines. There are several stunning reveals that are completely set up, laid like track right in front of us. But the brutal fighting and the bizarre characters and surprisingly playful steampunk design flourishes keep distracting, and so we keep getting surprised.
A couple moments here are all-timers, will be shown on reels at ceremonies 50 years from now. Most of all, I suspect, the New Year's celebration, which occurs every time the train reaches and crosses the Yekaterina Bridge.
I have no idea what Tilda Swinton thinks she was doing, but she was having a blast doing it, and I had a blast watching her.
And though the action is blunt and bruising (and fun, despite the fact that we are never allowed to forget that these are actual people being hurt), the thinking is surprisingly subtle. As in the idea that in a denuded, devastated, crushingly overpopulated world-in-microcosm, the rich man's greatest luxury is going to be solitude.
Movie Review: Since Otar Left
T.R.U.E. (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), Week of 7/8, Post #1:
Since Otar Left
In old Tblisi in Georgia, where water gives out mid-shower and the roads gape with potholes and what passes for the middle class live amid--and, when need be, sell off--the scant personal treasures (such as the library of French books) horded and hidden during Soviet times, a mother and daughter huddle in a small apartment and care for an aging grandmother. The grandmother lives mostly for letters or calls from her son Otar, a doctor who has long since emigrated to Paris, where he can only find construction work. One day, word comes that Otar has died in a construction accident. Fearing for the matriarch, the mother and daughter commence faking Otar's letters, so that the grandmother won't have to hear the truth.
That's pretty much the plot (although, for such a quiet film, it moves briskly, with the moments of potential discovery coming with alarming frequency). And though there are memorable images galore--the grandmother smoking alone in a rusting Ferris wheel gondola high above the city; the self-possessed, intellectual daughter coming home from an outing with the mother to find empty shelves where her father's books had been, all her life; the market in the crumbling city square where the mother and her longtime friend lay out the same wares for the same passersby, every single day; a glamorless, still-gorgeous Paris in summer rain--the lighting and the camera work stay determinedly humble, almost rickety. What's wonderful, charming, amazing about this film is these people. They reflect, subtly and brilliantly, the attitudes and prejudices and assumptions of their respective generations, but they're not allegories, and they're not incapable of change. The family they've created together is a loving one, and full of fractures. Their decisions are wrong, hurtful, and make perfect sense, every one.
And the ending...I can't really say. Don't want to give it away. But this is one of those endings--again, handled so quietly and deftly, it's almost as though nothing was occurring at all--that transforms everything that came before it. Makes you realize you were watching an entirely different beautiful movie than the one you thought you were watching. Comes as a shock. Makes total sense. Breaks your heart right where your heart loves to be broken.
Magical.
Since Otar Left
In old Tblisi in Georgia, where water gives out mid-shower and the roads gape with potholes and what passes for the middle class live amid--and, when need be, sell off--the scant personal treasures (such as the library of French books) horded and hidden during Soviet times, a mother and daughter huddle in a small apartment and care for an aging grandmother. The grandmother lives mostly for letters or calls from her son Otar, a doctor who has long since emigrated to Paris, where he can only find construction work. One day, word comes that Otar has died in a construction accident. Fearing for the matriarch, the mother and daughter commence faking Otar's letters, so that the grandmother won't have to hear the truth.
That's pretty much the plot (although, for such a quiet film, it moves briskly, with the moments of potential discovery coming with alarming frequency). And though there are memorable images galore--the grandmother smoking alone in a rusting Ferris wheel gondola high above the city; the self-possessed, intellectual daughter coming home from an outing with the mother to find empty shelves where her father's books had been, all her life; the market in the crumbling city square where the mother and her longtime friend lay out the same wares for the same passersby, every single day; a glamorless, still-gorgeous Paris in summer rain--the lighting and the camera work stay determinedly humble, almost rickety. What's wonderful, charming, amazing about this film is these people. They reflect, subtly and brilliantly, the attitudes and prejudices and assumptions of their respective generations, but they're not allegories, and they're not incapable of change. The family they've created together is a loving one, and full of fractures. Their decisions are wrong, hurtful, and make perfect sense, every one.
And the ending...I can't really say. Don't want to give it away. But this is one of those endings--again, handled so quietly and deftly, it's almost as though nothing was occurring at all--that transforms everything that came before it. Makes you realize you were watching an entirely different beautiful movie than the one you thought you were watching. Comes as a shock. Makes total sense. Breaks your heart right where your heart loves to be broken.
Magical.
July 7, 2014
Motherless Music
Perhaps the most enjoyable writing I've gotten a chance to do to bring attention to Motherless Child this summer is crafting a "Book Notes" column for Largehearted Boy (which also happens to be one of my favorite columns on one of the few sites I actually surf by every single day). If you've glanced at Motherless Child, you can probably guess why. The music matters--a lot--in this book. The playlist I crafted is Natalie's and the Whistler's more than mine. It's also full of the songs that got the book written in the first place.
My column runs Friday, July 11th, I believe. I'll post a link when it appears.
My column runs Friday, July 11th, I believe. I'll post a link when it appears.
