Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 13

Pike Movie

You can file this under things I never thought I’d type: I just received a signed contract for the movie option for Pike. And the driving force behind it is the French crime director, Olivier Marchal.

I can’t imagine anyone more perfect for the job. I’ve said this before — before I knew he was interested in Pike — but my favorite crime movie of the last ten years is his 36 Quai des Orfèvres (trailer here). He also created, writes and directs the television series Braquo, the first two seasons of which are available on Hulu.

Obviously, I know most of these deals fall through, so I’m not putting any down payments on San Luis Valley land yet. But, as you can probably tell, I couldn’t be more excited.

Guns, Books, Etc.

Lynchings in the West, Erased From History and Photos.
Stupid for carry, stupid for home defense, stupid for anything besides watermelons. Hell on watermelons.
“You know, sometimes a bad memory is like what they call an ill wind. It can blow somebody luck.“
What authors make.
Every story worth being written has already been written by Marty Robbins.
This made me want to write short stories again. Which may not be a good idea; I’m terrible at short stories. But still.
“They found that people working in creative fields, including dancers, photographers and authors, were 8% more likely to live with bipolar disorder. Writers were a staggering 121% more likely to suffer from the condition, and nearly 50% more likely to commit suicide than the general population.”

Rainbow Quest

Woke up to find that Pete Seeger died last night. Which is not much of a way to wake up. I can’t think of anybody who’s been a bigger part of the musical landscape of my life. It seems like he’s just always been there, making things better.

The picture above is from the Library of Congress’s Digital Collection. It’s Seeger showing up for Federal Court with his guitar to face “contempt of Congress” charges for refusing to answer questions from the Committee on Un-American Activities about his political beliefs. He was sentenced to a year in jail, and just before sentencing he tried to play a song for the judge – “Wasn’t That A Time” — but was shut down.

That sums up a lot of what I’ve always loved about Seeger. As does this. I’ve posted clips from it in different places before, but this is the first I know of the whole episode being available. (Take note of Johnny Cash, who is obviously having a real rough time holding it all together.)

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Parkour

Or, as I’ve been calling it, superhero training. Which is my kids’ latest obsession.

And God bless Boulder, there are classes.

 

Lost Manhood

I think Colorado just made some of the ingredients legal again. From the Denver Public Library’s newspaper archives.

Little Dick

From The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (Written by the same gentleman who penned The Gangs of New York). For no good reason other than that it stuck in my head when I read it a couple of weeks ago.

The memberships of many of the early hoodlum gangs included girls, and several were captained by maladjusted representatives of the so-called gentler sex. Curiously enough, or perhaps not so curiously, these girls were almost invariably more ferocious than their male companions, and their fertile minds devised most of the unpleasant methods of torture which the hoodlums employed upon their victims. One feminine rowdy who flourished during the latter part of 1878 was a thirteen-year-old girl known as Little Dick, who led a gang of more than twenty boys of about the same age. She was finally sent to a corrective institution, after she had stole a hundred revolvers from a gun-shop, distributing some among her follower, and sold the remainder on the Barbary Coast. She said frankly that she found her greatest delight in throwing red pepper into a Chinaman’s eyes or in hanging him up by his queue.

Lost Coast

If you’re lucky in life — and by lucky, I mean unlucky in just the right ways — there’ll come a time when you’ll find knots in your head that can only be undone by walking. You may not even know you’ve reached it until you find yourself lacing up your sturdiest shoes and kicking out your door, but if you’ve got the soul God gave a fencepost, it will happen. It may be you range the winter sidewalks and busted windows of your hometown every night after work, or it may be you disappear for a month or two on the Appalachian Trail. The only sure thing is that it will happen.

The thing is that we’re creatures of walking, just like we’re creatures of stories. There’s no civilization worthy of the name that’s forgotten that. Hank Williams wrote about it, Woody Guthrie was born to it, Walter Benjamin put his spin on it, and Jim Harrison’s just about got it mastered. And if Lost Coast is any indication, M.A. Littler understands it with the same precision that Jesus did when he walked out into the desert. Lost Coast is a beautiful and revolutionary film. The kind that will hopefully inspire you to liberate a library or set fire to a Costco, but will definitely, inevitably, drive you out of your house, and set you to putting one foot in front of the other.

Here’s the trailer. Watch it.

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Awards

I almost feel bad to be updating the blog with something that’s not culled from the microfiche machines at the Denver Public Library, but I got some great news out of France last week. Pike is up for two awards.

The first is the Prix des Balais d’or 2013. Watching this second life Pike’s taken on in France, it’s almost too good to believe. And any list I can be on with Eric Miles Williamson, well, I’ll take it. (And for the record, I’d give it to him if it was up to me. Welcome to Oakland is a fantastic book.)

The second is the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Which is absolutely amazing. It’s been around since 1948, and looking at their list of winners is the kind of thing that could give me a swollen head. (At least if I thought I really had any chance of winning, given the caliber of writer Pike‘s going up against.)

Again, and I know I say it too much, probably, but there aren’t words for how grateful I am that folks in France are reading that book. Though I’m guessing most of its success has to do with the translator, Jacques Mailhos.

In entirely unrelated news, I’ve taken a piece of advice from my (unnamed) social-media guru and started a Tumblr of shit I spot while I’m running around site scouting for the next few novels. Don’t expect much. I’m a lousy photographer and I’m taking ‘em with my cell phone. But if you’re interested, go here.

When the Cities are Gone

It could be the wildfires and it could be too much time thinking about Rocky Flats, but George Washington Hayduke’s been on my mind today. (From The Monkey Wrench Gang.)

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom — goddammit!  – herding the feral cattle in box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles!  banjos!  steel guitars!  by the light of the reborn moon! — by God, yes!  Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers and the general motherfuckers come back again.

Captain Ahab

Learned from Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick: a print of this picture hung in Faulkner’s living room.