Ashley Clifton

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Welcome to the Boomtown”

If you took the entire West-Coast noir mystery genre and made it into a great 1980s song, “Welcome to the Boomtown” by David and David would be the result. When I first heard it on the radio in 1986, I went straight out and bought the album. It’s one of the most haunting rock songs ever made, right up there with “Hotel California” (another song about California’s own particular kind of purgatory).

I love the way David Baerwald’s dark, ravaged voice seems to meld with David Rickett’s equally dark, slightly atonal guitar playing. And the lyrics sound like something Ross Macdonald might have written. “Welcome to the Boomtown” is a minor classic.

Enjoy, and rock on…

R.I.P. Gene Hackman

My parents divorced when I was a little kid. My mom was struggling with mental illness (undiagnosed, at the time) and so I went to live with my father and his new wife, my step-mother Eileen. I saw my mom mostly on the weekends, and we would invariably go to the movies. I probably saw over fifty movies in the theater per year, all with my mom.

I seldom went to the movies with my father, and even more seldomly when it was just the two of us. The last time I remember was in 1992. Eileen was out-of-town with my brother and sister, so Dad and I went to see Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. It’s a great movie, and both my father and I loved it. We especially admired Gene Hackman’s performance as the villainous sheriff Little Bill Daggett, who, as Hackman himself revealed, is a kind of precursor to the modern right-wing movement.

My dad and I went out to dinner after the movie, and we shared our favorite moments from the film. It’s one of my fondest memories. I thought of it this morning when I read that Hackman had died. And I thought of something else, too. It occurred to me that the last movie I saw alone with my mother was also a Gene Hackman film, 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime. It’s about as different a film from Unforgiven as one can possibly imagine, with Hackman playing a completely different kind of character. And yet, it was still Hackman. Still low-key. Still forceful. Still brilliant.

What are the odds that the two last movies I saw with each of my parents alone were both Hackman films? Pretty good, actually. He was in a lot of movies. In fact, you could argue that he was the most versatile, compelling, and attractive character actor in Hollywood history. He played villains and heroes, and everything in between, across genres from action to mystery to sci-fi. In Twice in a Lifetime, he played an unassuming everyman who, on the tail-end of middle-age, leaves his wife to make a new start. He was also Lex Luthor in Superman. And Pop-eye Doyle in The French Connection. And the blind guy in Young Frankenstein.

Being a writer of mysteries, I’m particularly fond of Authur Penn’s 1975 film Night Moves, in which Hackman played a world-weary P.I. searching for a missing girl. It’s one of trademark, understated performances, and yet it crackles with energy. That was his gift.

Godspeed, Mr. Hackman…!!!

Middlemarch Video (Part 2 of 2)!!!

Well, it took us a while, but my great friend Margaret Luongo and I finally finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch! (Hey, give us a break–it’s almost 900 freakin pages long!)

Here is our discussion of the second half and heart-stopping conclusion of the book for our Read a Classic Novel…Together channel. And, guess what! We both agree that it’s a truly great book (and probably should have been LONGER!).

Enjoy!

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Lord of Light”

I’ve read a lot of trippy science books in my time, but Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light is probably the trippiest. The only one that sort of comes close is Frank Herbert’s Dune, which makes a lot of sense considering both were written in the 1960s by two extremely smart and talented writers. (One of Zelazny’s other books, This Immortal, actually shared the Hugo Award with Dune in 1967.)

In fact, there’s not really a name for what Lord of Light is. Technically, it’s science fiction fantasy (a sub-genre I’ve written about before). That is, it looks and feels like a fantasy novel (as does Dune) until you realize that the plot has a sci-fi underpinning. Lord of Light is set on an alien world in which the population is stuck in a pre-industrial state, ruled over by gods of the Hindu pantheon. These gods interact with mortal humans on a daily basis, using magical powers and objects to control their destiny. Throughout the novel, however, Zelazny drops carefully crafted clues that the “gods” are actually the crew of a starship called The Star of India, which crash-landed on the planet centuries before.

These faux-deities use high-technology to set themselves up as gods, complete with a kind of immortality (they can transfer their consciousness to new, young bodies when the old ones wear out). They rule over the common people (who are revealed to be the descendants of the passengers of the ship) with an iron fist, doling out justice and retrobution from a floating, anti-gravity city (“heaven”). This reign is, ostensibly, for the people’s own good (tyrants always say this, right?). But when one of the last democratically-minded crew members, Sam, takes on the role of Siddhartha, he poses a threat to the status quo, which has kept humanity stagnant for generations.

This 1987 edition from Avon was the one I read in college, and I still own it. Its cover was done by an English illustrator named Tim White. I really like it because it captures that essential trippiness. At first, it looks like a pop-religion book, depicting figures dressed like Hindu gods. But what’s with the blue electric bolts? Or the floating city? And why is one of the Hindu “goddesses” blonde?

Ahhh, it’s really a sci-fi novel.

Yes, it is.

Q&A with Book Notions!

I had a really good time this week doing a Q&A with Bianca Vendenbos of Book Notions. Check it out here when you can!

The Scientist Hero: Our Newest Cinema Archetype

One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.

How does he overcome all these challenges?

Science.

The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Anarchy in the U.K.”

Sometimes you just have to go back to basics. And what could be more basic than the definitive punk-rock song of all time?

Some things you might not know about the Sex Pistols: 1.) Their original name was The Pistols. Their favorite venue was a club called Sex. The rest is history. 2.) They only had one studio album. 3.) They broke up on stage in San Francisco on their one and only U.S. tour. 4.) John Lydon was given his nickname, Johnny Rotten, for his bad teeth (allegedly).

Also, Billy Idol uses the opening lines of “Anarchy in the U.K.” as the opening lines for his excellent memoir Dancing with Myself. Who am I to argue with Billy Idol?

What I’m Reading: Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?

I learned many things from reading the excellent nonfiction book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? For instance, I learned that the Vatican has its own astronomical observatory, which is run, in part, by the authors, Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller. Both men are also Jesuits. (The current Pope, Francis, is also a Jesuit—that’s another thing I learned).

Now, I was raised Catholic, and I thought a knew a thing or two about the religion. But not only did I learn from this book that the Vatican has its own observatory, but that it has had one for hundreds of years. In fact, I was so taken by this discovery that I Googled “Vatican observatory” and, to my amazement, found that the Vatican also runs an observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Talk about synchronicity! When I was twenty-two years old, I went off to attend grad school at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and I distinctly remember the first night I spent there. I impressed by the size of the city—much larger than my little hometown of Gainesville, Florida—but also by how beautiful the desert sky was. Even in the downtown area, the stars were clearly visible. This was no accident; the city, I was told, purposely kept the streets relatively dark, in deference to the many astronomical observatories that surround the valley, which could not function if too much light pollution bled from the metro area.

Apparently, the Vatican’s observatory is one of them.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Can’t Stand Losing You”

If you’re old enough to remember the early 1980s, you probably know that there was a time when Sting was more than just a meme, and The Police were the greatest rock band in the world. When I say greatest, I mean by almost any measurable component—records sold, concerts sold out, number of MTV plays in any given week, number of magazine articles written about them, etc.—they were at number one. (The only artists who could really give them a run for their money were Michael Jackson and Madonna, and I don’t count either of them as rock artists, though I love them both, especially Madonna.)

Heck, I’m old enough to remember when The Police, themselves, weren’t a rock band, either. They were more of a punk, reggae-adjacent garage band. And that period was, imho, their peak. Yes, “Every Breath You Take” is a classic—arguable the most successful rock song of the 20^th Century—but it came out on what was, in some ways, The Police’s least interesting album, Synchronicity. Their very best songs, I think, come from earlier albums, including this one about a guy who, well, can’t stand losing…you.

Rock on…

Books on Art: “de Kooning – An American Master”

On those rare occasions when I choose to read a big, fat, thick-as-a-brick book about a famous person, I usually pick one about a politician. David McCullough’s Truman is a great example. I tend to gravitate toward books about political figures because, in the course of reading about their lives, you also get a free history lesson. That is, the story of Harry Truman is also the story of World War II, the atomic bomb, Korea, the founding of Israel, and the Berlin Wall.

Biographies of artists are more problematic, for me. I just finished reading de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. It chronicles the long life of the great painter—a life barely contained within the span of the Twentieth Century—in which de Kooning lived to be the celebrated, Grand Old Man of modern American art. He became, in fact, the only American artist whose figure and reputation approached those of Picasso.