Edward Riche's Blog, page 3
June 16, 2012
April 24, 2012
“Good Guys on the California Dime”
For your listening pleasure, Sean Panting’s “68A”. The song is an account of Sean’s turn playing a hooligan from Push Through in the film “Rare Birds”, the screenplay of which I wrote based on my novel.
With its “Hurry up and wait!” refrain this should be THE song about filmmaking. It’s from Sean’s record “Pop Disaster”
April 20, 2012
Radio Interview with Shelagh Rogers
Thought this was a good interview.
April 3, 2012
Bear
About halfway between where I was born and where I live now,
In Greenspond
December 4, 2011
Vintage
The arrival of two subsequent vintages, 2008 and 2009, of wines from a grower and maker in Burgundy at the same time demands comparisons. The grower, Glantenay, with holdings in Volnay and Pommard is new to me but debuts near the top of my charts. From what I've tasted thus far, the ready-to-drink simple "bourgognes" (young or declassified vines, batches not worthy of higher designation) we are in the glorious realm of small producer Burgundy, real terroirist stuff. Both vintages have polish, both have a lot of red berry notes, raspberry and, a little less so, partridgeberry. The 09, though, has a dollop of black fruit on top of this, like ripe plum. The profile of a the 08 is stony, the 09 earthy. Gravelly things in the 08 versus fungal, sous bois things in the 09. There is something more "sappy" in the 09s and more "leafy" in the 08s. 2009 is thought the "better" year but I prefer to think of them only as different. (Some vintages are utter busts, some are exceptionally good but most are somewhere in between. ) There is no intrusive oak in these examples so I venture they were raised in older barrels. The 09 is, predictably, more closed and needs a few hours in the decanter to reveal itself. When opened the 09 had a faint whiff of cabbagy ferment, like good beaujolais cru, that blew off. I find that tends be a good sign in best wines made from pinot noir and gamay, Some would say it's a flaw, indicating the presence of excess mercaptans. I speculate wildly that the correct, judicious measure of that might be an essential thing, merely indicating less intrusive making. I know mercaptans are too "heavy" to "blow off" but something is happening.
Volnay
There is nothing grandiose or obvious about these wines. They are clean and lithe and subtle. They don't show themselves without the context of food. I shall be accused of abject flakiness but I think this kind of drink only finds its full expression at the convivial table. It's not flamboyant enough for a restaurant other than the simplest bistro. It is meant for home cooked fare shared with family and friends.
Skin the rabbits.
November 21, 2011
Globe Review
Easy to Like lives up to the promise of its title
reviewed by kevin chong
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Nov. 21, 2011 6:00AM EST
The satirical subjects of Edward Riche's witty and stylish novel Easy to Like are, at first glance, an utter mismatch: wine-making in California and the bureaucratic clockwork that keeps the mandated showbiz of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. a-ticking. Riche, the author of the novels Rare Birds and The Nine Planets, bridges the terroirs of Sideways and The Newsroom through his protagonist Elliot Jonson, a Newfoundland-born Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring winemaker, whose life work, in a sense, boils down to making people like what he makes.
Easy to Like. By Edward Riche. Anansi, 293 pages, $29.95
When he first appears to the reader, Elliot's life in California is imploding. The middle-aged screenwriter's wife has left him for their housekeeper; his son, embittered by his childhood as an actor, is incarcerated on drug charges. The prospects for his most recent movie idea, Nailed, is … well, screwed. "They don't think Brokeback meets Passion of the Christ has an audience," his agent explains. "They don't buy the whole gay Jesus thing."
Even worse, Elliot's actual passion project, a winery in Santa Barbara, is short on cash, which prompts an associate to suggest producing a populist zinfandel. Faced with a choice between purveying inferior product and insolvency, Elliot instead flees to France.
When a near-expired passport keeps him in Toronto, Elliot's channel-surfing inspires him to call in a favour and land the No. 2 position at the Mother Corp, which "did possess a certain charm in its inability to be slick." There, he finds his Hollywood-bred instincts to find an audience at all costs compromised by the public broadcaster's fuzzily defined requirements to reflect Canada.
One show titled Banff 911, a regionally representative drama meant to draw in the entire family, has ratings that are "[in] the range of the survey's error." Eventually, Elliot's sole hit will come from a late-night show hosted by a fallen TV star that the newly appointed exec finds living in a ravine.
Riche, the St. John's-based screenwriter who has worked on Canadian productions like The Boys of St. Vincent and Dooley Gardens, has great fun at the idea of bureaucrats creating entertainment. The CBC that he lampoons, neglecting to mention shows like Hockey Night in Canada and Dragons' Den, presents a patronizingly high-minded reflection of the country: "It's a Tim Hortons nation," one character observes. "Who should expect a population whose favourite food is Kraft Dinner to go in for documentaries about Stockhausen?"
While smartly written, Easy to Like often feels too casually constructed and imagined (but not quite rambling enough to qualify as "picaresque"). The motivation for Elliot to find work at CBC is hardly present, the passages about wine production are mainly inaccessible to those who aren't oenophiles, and the book presents a number of potentially amusing storylines – the cult next to the winery, in which worshippers wear loaves of bread as shoes; a wiretapping indictment involving major Hollywood players; a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation into French vines smuggled into California by Elliot – but leaves them all unripened.
On another level, this insouciant approach gives the reader enough breathing space to appreciate Riche's gift for withering turns of phrase. Elliot, who is as commanding and detached in Toronto as he is incompetent and over-the-hill in Los Angeles, attends one CBC meeting where "[nothing] of substance was put forward, but it was all said in the ornate poetry of management non-speak."
As a title, Easy to Like presents one fat target for a reviewer, but the book lives up to its promise by offering a spry, light-hearted defence of cultivated taste and an artist's prerogative in the face of entertainment by committee.
Kevin Chong's most recent book, the novel Beauty Plus Pity, has just been published.
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October 29, 2011
Contrary
I am a fan of The New Yorker's lead literary critic James Wood. A review of his put me on to Geoff Dyer's "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi", a novel I enjoyed. I also thought highly of Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty". But in The New Yorker of October 17th, 2011 Woods commends Hollinghurst for just the sort of prose that I complained about in my post here of September 17.
"In his second novel, The Folding Star" (1994), Hollinghurst described the experience of watching the Wimbledon tennis tournament on television, on a warm summer's day, with the windows open. Occasionally, a plane could be heard outside: "the sonic wallow of a plane distancing in slow gusts above." Again, the power flows from nouns and adjectives placed in unusual combinations—the slight paradox of "slow gusts" (a gust is usually rapid) and the almost onomatopoeic "sonic wallow," which truly slows the sentence down."
Well, "slow gusts" doesn't work for me precisely because it doesn't make sense. And "sonic wallow" surely does "slow the sentence down", but I believe it is because of the hiccup it induces in the normal process of comprehension. It is to me a whole bunch of writing … and it is some of the most lauded of our time so my distaste for it puts me in a tiny minority.
Ed and Andrew in Venice
Something else now, some more grousing and complaining. Readers today seem to love characters whose inner lives are in constant view, who are in an almost continual state of introspection and self reflection. These characters study their own actions rather than responding, as I believe we mostly do, by reflex and rote. I am up every night at 3 am for a good hour of painful and mostly fruitless rumination and never regard myself and revisit things to nearly the degree most characters I read these days do. Characters don't usually have enough "present" for me.
I have the sensation of being led, by hand, as one would a child when I'm told, rather than left to determine for myself, what motivates a character's actions.
Again I believe this puts me at odds with most readers out there.
It's the same for wine, if I'm led by the hand, I don't enjoy it so much. I've learned that if it scores highly with one of the review sites that "score" wines it will be too obvious for me.
October 12, 2011
Dutch Waggoner and Patricia Franchini
They can't properly be called "cameos"…. but in a form of homage I borrowed character names from movies I've loved and salted them throughout "Easy to Like". I won't list those characters, some of them small, some of them even off screen, from films like "Chinatown" and "Fargo", that would spoil the fun. A couple of names from The Pat Hobby Stories do make proper, if anachronistic cameos, playing a writer and a director just as they did in Scott Fitzgerald's taut and hilarious original.
I visited Fitzgerald's last place of residence when I was in Los Angeles, researching some of my novel's geography. It is now completely obscured from view by a high hedge, likely because of gawkers like myself. Yes, street addresses too, have walk-ons in the novel. The home of Charlie Chaplin is there. The sight of a drunken Herman Mankiewicz car crash got cut.
Jean Seberg
Okay … one clue … that's Patricia Franchini above.
October 9, 2011
Steve Jobs Jobs Jobs
The Bookery, the only independent bookstore in St. John's has closed its doors. It was one of those terrific squat little shops where you always came away with titles other than those you'd sought. Now the downtown of this booming burgh is without a place to buy new literature. There's nowhere to see a film either.
first Marconi, now this
At the same time, against the odds, CBC television has produced and is airing a brilliant new show, "Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays". (It's the sort of show "Easy to Like" said the CBC, with its middlebrow branding, could no longer make.) Nobody is watching it.
"Numbers" are down all over. Neither noisy 3-D extravaganzas nor small pictures for grown-ups got the audiences the film biz expected this year. With the exception of "events" in Chimpanzee telly (a new Chimp to lead "Two and a Half Men" for instance) fewer people are glaring at the box.
What are they doing instead? Are they in the sylvan hills gathering mushrooms? Opting to stay in bed for a morning fuck? Perhaps they're whittling or teaching themselves to play the harmonica?
No, they are watching and playing with their smart phones. Where people once carted a pulp novel or a magazine along to wait for their Toyota to be serviced, or their flight to depart, they now have their phone. They can sort of read stuff, tweet and update their status (shouldn't their status always be "updating my status"). They can look to see whether a cheque has cleared. They can survey the menu of a restaurant they are considering visiting. They can read fudged and planted online reviews of the fare there. They can play a game with blinking lights. That is what they are doing.
They already vibrate, once they come fitted with a fleshy socket, smart phones will pretty much do it all.
I'm beginning to bore myself with my middle-aged prefacing of things, like "ten years ago …". "Ten years ago there was that little traffic you could have played street hockey on Kings Bridge on a Saturday morning."
But who could have imagined, ten years ago, that people would be so engaged with, and entranced by, their phones.
October 7, 2011
Able Seaman Keith Chebucto
By Edward Riche (House of Anansi Press)
Elliot Jonson can't catch a break. Edward Riche's newest protagonist boasts a stagnant screenwriting career, an estranged son and newly-homosexual ex-wife, and a passion (but lack of skill) for wine-making. Bitter with his unaccommodating life, dodging debts and caught up in a burgeoning scandal, Elliot moves to escape to France but finds himself detained in Toronto—purgatory for showbiz minds—where he manages to bluff his way to the top of the CBC. Easy to Like is just that and more, Riche's prose is astute and bitingly comic in its depictions of Canada and the average Canadian viewer. Although his lack of concern for plot points may alienate some readers, the real pleasure comes from his richness of characters, ridiculous situations, and surprisingly believable comedic timing. Elliot's life is a comedy of errors that we applaud with one hand, the other patting ourselves on the back for being—as credit-loving Canadians—such great inspiration.
…
Author Edward Riche is coming to Halifax to host a wine dinner and read from his new book Easy to Like on Oct. 23 at Bistro Le Coq.
…
We'll be tasting some of the delicious wines that featured in the novel so it should be terrific fun.
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