Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 18

The Kinjiku- Parallels

The Kinjiku- Creative Parallels

Postproduction. Here we are. Editing is underway, and we have one scene in the beginning to drop footage into. Credits, opening and closing. Interesting parallels abound here. At the beginning of this process, I wondered if some of the tools I use in other creative mediums could be adapted to this task and it turns out the answer is yes, but with the caveat of ‘kinda’. I’ll explain, beginning with the music.

Western Wind, performed by Alfred Deller, is a haunting, forlorn, lost thing- perfect in almost every way (see link below). I needed a new version of it and I knew I could get it. How? I’m a musician. So are most of my friends. And some of them have gotten really fuckin’ good over the years. Enter Mikel Ross and Pietro Staccia. I approached them and they were in Lucky Recording Co. in San Francisco that very afternoon, recording a modified version of the song with a clear objective. No surprise, the result is even more haunting, more forlorn, more lost than ever, and is has the same period feel. I have a great friendship with these two incredibly bright guys, and we speak the same music language. Music language is the tool I used here. That was early on, and it was a foreshadowing of what was to come.

In art, specifically tattooing, there are many tools that cross easily into different mediums. Take a large, complex tattoo and break it apart. What you have first is a drawing on paper. By the time you’re done it’s a third draft if you’re lucky (sound familiar, writers?). But then you take that drawing to the theater. You make a transfer and then apply that transfer to the skin. At that point you’re winging it. You’re performing. While you do, the drawing changes a little. Skin is strange stuff, full of cowlicks and whorls, like a flank steak. You adjust. You adapt. While you do all this, you keep track of your subject (the client), the people in the lobby, the well being of your coworkers, and what you’re going to do next, because timing is everything if you want to keep on schedule.

That, it turns out, has a whole lot in common with directing (so far, I may change my mind later). The tool that links all of this? If you’re going to make mistakes, make a creative ones. How do you do that? Imagination. All mistakes are potentially creative ones if you remain fluid in the moment. I’ve said many times in pep talks that the imagination is akin to a muscle. I’ll say it again now. Exercise it often, feed it good food, listen to it. Grow it and sculpt it with health and longevity in mind. That, it turns out, is the underlying parallel I was looking for.

‘Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.’ – Albert Einstein

Go to http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check out the cool pics as they come in.

A little music from Alfred B-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNhVPdKtsfE

 

 

Tacos and Space/Time Dimples, the free short story of the month for April

Tacos and Space/Time Dimples

            I was never fascinated with food in the way a chef might be, not really, but for as long as I can remember its always been something I wanted to learn more about. When I cook at home, and I do every day, just as you do, I like the way the smells change and the house changes as it does. Baking transforms a place slowly. Braising, stewing. You understand. Those smells build and complicate and grow rich, and as they do, so does the appetite. That’s the part I actually love. All this began at a young age, far before the dawn of Food Porn and celebrity chefs, or even the popular use of the dipshit yuppie quasi-word ‘foodie’. There are three or four culinary windows that opened and stayed open, times when a sudden jump in awareness came. I still have them from time to time, as I did recently in Japan when I was eating noodles at this steamy little place in Shinjuku. I can remember it like it happened yesterday- the broth, the intense faces, the muted kitchen clamor, the textures and temperatures. But here are my foundation blocks in food appreciation, the ones that informed all that was to come after.

Read the rest in the Free Short Story Of The Month section on http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com, the Jeff Johnson Author Official Website. At the end is the recipe for Green Chili Sweet Potato Stew. Enjoy! And thanks for looking!

The Kinjiku short film, leg one complete

Well, holy fuckin’ shit.

I’m writing this on the flight back to Portland from LA. Seatbelt dude there to my right, doing his pantomime. Rock on dude. This has been a fantastic stint of lights camera action stuff. The Kinjiku shoot is about 80% done, with one day left in Manhattan coming right up. The Los Angeles leg was very smooth, though of course as a first time director I have no real reference. But is seemed smooth, and that’s what counts I guess. Several of the days went from 3 AM to almost midnight, and I was amazed at how many morning people work in film. A morning person can double as a night owl, but it doesn’t work the other way around. Some of the bigger obstacles that I can mention? The LA Marathon was cruising right past a bar we were filming a night sequence in. Everything worked out. We wound up without some of the props we needed and that could have been a massive, epic, unexpected wipeout but for the lightning moves of producer Javier Lovato. Good job dude, way to rock it. And there were a few other things, mostly personal. For whatever fucked up reason I wore really nice shoes to this whole thing and man, you are not supposed to spend day after day standing around in wingtips. They look cool. They’re super comfy when you’re sitting on an airplane like I am right now, but after a certain point, damn. What a dipshit. And personal problem two- I thought it would be warmer and I didn’t bring my coat. It warmed up a few days in, but it’s just so weird to be cold in the presence of a palm tree. And if that’s a bad as it gets, well, I can call this a success. Editing has been an unexpectedly rich experience too. My friend Ian told me in advance to go in with cutaways galore and I wish I’d gone hog wild, but we have a great, amazing, imaginative guy in Dan Harris, and he really knows his tools. Those guys could fake a moon landing in an afternoon. So cool. I’ll post more later on this of course but thank you to everyone involved in The Kinjiku once again. So many people, and every one of them a gem. I’m delighted to have worked (an be working, and to work again) with so many talented people, and best of all? I made a whole bunch of friends. Pictured is the great actors Tony Dennison and Tom Hildreth, fantastic guys. Go to www.greatpinkskeleton.com and click on The Kinjiku link in coming days for more.

Root, Storm, The Wind- a late (or early) free short story of the month

Root, Storm, The Wind

When I first met Guillermo Francisco Javier Munez, he was lying on his back in his driveway in a misting rain on a September morning, elbow deep in the underside innards of his car door. The car was an old station wagon, made mostly from whatever people packed into the gaping holes left by rust. The rest of it was rust with less bite. The rear bumper was held on by an old brown extension cord, and the tags had expired almost a decade ago. Guillermo himself was in his essence much the same. He was a fattish Mexican man, wearing a medium sized tee shirt and jeans, both of which might never have seen the inside of a washing machine, or even the wash basins that hailed from the same period as his car and his clothes. His unlaced construction boots were spattered with a bizarre collection of off-colored, remaindered paints and what could only have been refried beans. He was by far the most disgusting person I have ever met. I still think of him that way.

read more at http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com

 

Three Hauntings

Busy times here at the Pacific outpost. Working on a handful of projects and its all going smoothly, but a few weeks ago while I was tinkering with the finer points of something I was thinking. Thinking, for me, is an act of listening in many ways. Listening for ideas. And sometimes in those moments of quiet, one of the stories that haunt me will rise up and present itself. There are many of them. Here are three-

The Campus Knifing

One night years ago I was hanging out with this gal. We stopped by to visit a friend of hers and had a couple drinks. I was bored, barely listening, when the conversation veered abruptly into horror. They were talking about college. The friend, we’ll call her Becky, had been accepted to one of her favorite universities and her mother had come out to help her move into the dorm. It was day one. The question, left hanging for years, was why Becky had abruptly packed all her shit and gone home with her mother and suffered a nervous breakdown. No one ever knew what happened. The mood in the room changed. There were a few other people there by then. All of them were curious if this mystery would finally be solved that night. Becky’s face went white and her hands sort of bent into crow hands, and she finally told them.

“My mother and I had just moved all my stuff into the room and finished decorating. We were looking out the window and talking about lunch. My dorm room had a view of the campus park and there was a jogging route that led along the edge of the forest across the field. We were watching as a young man, maybe a young woman with short hair, run along with headphones on. My mom said she thought I should take up jogging too. A man came out of the woods and stabbed the jogger to death and then ran back into the trees. They never found out who the man was.”

The Train Station Man

When I was in 8th grade my science teacher was this beefy guy named Mr. March. Nice guy. It was the gifted class and we were all dorks on the way to cubical glory. One day some kid asked him about his own middle school science experience. The question stunned him. We’d just gone to visit a private school on a field trip and trounced them in a science standoff. The story he told was… haunting. Mr. March had gone to a private school himself, in upstate New York. One winter night around the holidays he’d been riding the train back to the campus. He was big for a kid in the 8th grade. His rich parents probably thought he’d be okay riding the last train of the night to a remote stop. When he got off, he was the only passenger, a lone kid with a bag of books. There was a man waiting, and Mr. March thought he was there to meet someone who missed the train. But still, he had a bad feeling for some reason. He started walking, fast, and when he looked back the man was gone. Mr. March never understood why this scared him, but it did, so he dropped the books and started running down the dark road toward the campus. He didn’t look back until he was almost there. He almost dropped out of his sprint before he looked back, but he didn’t. He turned his head just enough to save his life. The man was right behind him, three steps back, running silently. In the next month or two, a half dozen people in the area disappeared and were never found. Three of them were students, traveling together for safety after Mr. March told his story. The man was never found either.

The Hairdresser and Her Daughter

When I was in 10th grade I used to get my hair cut by this super hot middle age woman at the little place down the street. She was a chain smoker, big blond hair, long fingernails, big blue eyes and huge tits she would press into me. She winked a great deal. Her daughter looked just like her, but she was 15 and so was I. I left and a few years later I came back to that city in Missouri and eventually I ran into someone from my old neighborhood. I asked after the hairdresser and her daughter and the kid’s face darkened. “They disappeared,” he said. “Last year. Someone came over to their house and found the door open. They’d just made popcorn and the TV was on. No clothes missing, car in the driveway, just… gone. No one ever saw them again.”

There are more.

Lucky Supreme, A Novel Of Many Crimes- out now in paperback and on Audible

“The bastard lovechild of Charles Bukowski and Raymond Chandler, Lucky Supreme is a novel so good you’ll want to ink it into your skin.”—Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries

“Lucky Supreme is one hell of a book. I didn’t know anyone could do noir like this. Now I know Jeff Johnson can.” —Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of The Bottoms and ten time Bram Stoker Award winner

“As hip and cool as the neon rain-slicked streets of Portland. Darby Holland is a modern hero in the mold of Sam Spade and Marlowe only with more tattoos and in steel-toed boots. A funny and very gritty book with cool folks, cool music, and wonderful sense of place.” –Ace Atkins, New York Times Bestselling author of The Innocents and Robert B. Parker’s Slow Burn

“What wonderful Northwest noir. LUCKY SUPREME cruises through Portland’s underworld with a raunchy grace and an unfailing sense of black humor. I loved it.” —New York Times bestselling & 3-time Edgar Award-winning author T. Jefferson Parker

“Jeff Johnson is the real deal. His work is fast and funny, down and dirty—one moment as smooth as 18-year-old bourbon and the next as rough as a country road. A great talent, a pleasure to read.”–Brad Smith, Dashiell Hammett Prize-nominee

“Johnson launches the first of a noir trilogy with this highly original caper novel. Darby Holland is the proprietor of the Lucky Supreme, a tattoo parlor in the Old Town neighborhood of Portland, Ore., where he and his artists, a gang of societal misfits, have created their own niche within this gentrifying community. Johnson, a veteran tattoo artist, captures the conflict between the two cultures perfectly without any false sentiment . . . The inventive, unorthodox Darby effectively marshals his forces against thugs, officials, and even federal agents in this amusing crime tale.” —PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY Starred Review

“Lucky Supreme by Jeff Johnson. Don’t be surprised if you pull an all-nighter to finish Lucky Supreme which starts off with a theft in a tattoo parlor in Portland, Oregon and launches the protagonist on a dark, thrilling adventure full of deception, freaks, and surreal situations.” Top 25 novels of 2017 —MEDIUM/The Know

“Johnson wields the lurid pen of twentieth century crime novelists like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane and stands with contemporaries like Michael Connelly and Walter Mosley to grace the grit of dark streets.”—THE EUGENE WEEKLY

 

“Quick, thrilling, this is a novel filled with many crimes and is just the beginning of what looks to be a very interesting trilogy.”—SUSPENSE MAGAZINE

Back From Japan! Book Release Day For The Animals After Midnight

Japan was incredible! I have four reviews to publish, but they’re all still in note form for the moment. The day before I left Tokyo I landed a lucrative screenwriting gig and I just finished. So stay tuned.

We ate some truly astonishing food. Tokyo is a beautiful city, and less expensive to visit than, say, Seattle or Portland (where I live for the moment). It was great to read the foreign press as well. The rest of the world has a very different take on 5G, the events at Davos, and the Chinese Space Program, for instance.

More on all that soon. Today is also the surprise book launch for The Animals After Midnight. Sky horse has a new, bigger distributor in Simon & Schuster, and there are the inevitable data wrinkles. As of today, AAM is available on Amazon. Look for it at a bookstore near you and with any luck at all, you’ll find it.

The Deadbomb Bingo Ray audiobook is available now!

I’m in Tokyo right now and I just got a chance to listen to Deadbomb Bingo Ray on audiobook. What a rush! How strange is that? Blackstone is a fantastic audiobook outfit, and reader Johnny Heller is outstanding. Go to Audible.com and check out the free snippet, then go ahead and freak out and buy everything Blackstone has to offer. More on the fun times here in Japan tomorrow. Here’s a cool pic from this mornings stroll through Shinjuku-[image error]

Free Story Of The Month For January- Excerpt from the new novel The Fortunate Ones

By the time he was old enough to drink in a bar, Hank had already stumbled over and pocketed many of life’s more obvious truths. To play the piano, he knew, was to hear all music more clearly and so its own reward, but beyond that, the organization of music illuminated the structure of thoughts. To cook, and to cook well and with invention, was to make the road though life both broad and scenic. To have and respect even one gay friend for the span of a year was to forever change one’s wardrobe for the better. The bold and reckless willingness to fight made fear and fighting uncommon. Whimsy, most sacred, was the saddle of wisdom. Hank was a gentleman brawler, a home chef with an eye for mushrooms and berries and the edible weeds in parklands. There was secret choral music in his head. Because of all this, he was a natural collector of ideas, and those ideas mated in his moments of chemical lucidity and gave rise to ideas of their own. Hank called them ‘off springers’.

Thoughts were all conveyed in one way or another. Some, the sentiments, could be found in song. Stories often had a point or a moral. Parables had subtext. Messages howled in advertising and television, superstitions in forecasts, lies in between the lines. The mode of communication, the method, the means, the medium, from the earliest cave paintings to the music video made seconds ago, shaped the essence of the information they carried. Mode informed content. Hank knew this. His ideas knew this. His mind resonated with it. What perfect combination of a) thought, b) the will to transmit it, and c) medium of exchange might result in action of a specific kind, one that reminded Hank of himself? So that he might see objectively the gears of his own design? Kaons came to mind. Kaons and fortune cookies.

“Tonight is the night.” Hank drained his pint and looked again through the window. Across from him, Kelly and Ruth followed his gaze. The K&L Orient would close forever tomorrow, but it already abandoned. In the last three months, they’d mapped out its entire interior, using the bar they were in as cover. They’d become friends with the bartender Benny, and even had a few pleasant exchanges with the bakers at the K&L, so they all felt a little bad now that it was finally showtime.

More at http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com

The Animals After Midnight- Publishers Weekly

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The Animals After Midnight: A Darby Holland Crime Novel

Jeff Johnson. Arcade, $24.99 (328p) ISBN 978­1­62872­ 975­7

Darby Holland has a complex backstory, as shown in Johnson’s engrossing third novel featuring the Portland, Ore., tattoo parlor and strip club owner (after 2017’s A Long Crazy Burn). Early on, for example, the reader learns that Darby once drugged a real estate developer and sent “him off to die in Russia.” Now some of that checkered past has resurfaced. Darby returns home one night to find concrete evidence to buttress his suspicion that someone has been stalking him—footprints in the dirt outside his bedroom window. The search to identify his stalker turns deadly. Eventually, the trail leads to Midnight Rider Productions, which has been producing episodic documentaries. The company’s sadistic business model is to destroy a person’s life and film the resulting decline, which in at least one instance ends in suicide. Johnson lightens the heavy subject matter with odd subplots, including Darby’s journey into the woods to bury a friend’s nephew’s dead and frozen pet. Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased. (Feb.)