Book Talk – “The Dispossessed”, Part 2 of 2!

As usual, it took us a while, but Margaret and I finally posted our second (and final) book talk episode on Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic sci-fi novel The Dispossessed. I will probably be doing another post on my final thoughts about the book soon. In the meantime, please check out the videos (Part I is here) and give them a like.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “The Man Who Sold the World”

David Bowie was a musical genius. And perhaps the only bad thing about being a musical genius is the possibility that someday another genius might come along and do a cover of one your songs that’s better than the original. That’s what Kurt Cobain did, I think, with this cover, recorded in 1993 on MTV. And he was only twenty-six at the time.

Oh, well. Here, for your entertainment (and, I hope, solace) is a song written by one genius and sung by another, with some really great musicians playing along.

Rock on…

R.I.P. Robert Redford

The great scholar Joseph Campbell once explained that every time we go into a cinema and see a movie star—Tom Cruise, for example—up on the screen, some part of our brains is aware that the real person, the actor Tom Cruise, is alive somewhere else in that same, exact moment. This ability to exist in two places at once, Campbell said, is an aspect of a God, a living divinity. 

Our subconscious perception of actors as gods is one reason we are always surprised by the death of a movie star, especially one who has been around since we, ourselves, were kids. How could they ever die? They seem to occupy a higher plane of reality, immortal, always youthful if not actually young. 

Robert Redford was surely one of the greatest movie stars of my youth, and he starred in two of my favorite films of all time, All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, both of which I have written about on this blog. What made him interesting was that weird dichotomy of blond, athletic, all-American good-looks combined with a reserved, wary intelligence. (On my list of Hollywood Archetypes, he fits squarely in the “Dark Prince” slot.) He was a very smart man, who did a lot of amazing things both on-screen and off-. Among the most notable of these was his founding of the Sundance Film Festival, which has come to rival Cannes as the preferred venue for indie-film directors to premiere their movies. 

The fact that Redford would create an alternative festival for “the little guys” in the film industry was typical. He was, in some ways, the most counter-cultural movie star of the last fifty years—even more so than Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda—in that he made movies about men fighting some vast, evil establishment. Often, this was the military-industrial complex in either its actual (All the President’s Men) or its fantasy (Three Days of the Condor) form. In his later years, when Redford could no longer play the lead, he took on the role of the villain who represents this evil empire, as in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

As a kid, I always found something soothing about Robert Redford, even in movies filled with threats and violence. I suspect that, in my mind, he represented the best spirit of my parents’ generation (he was roughly the same age as my father). That is, the young adults of the 1960s and 70s. Post-hippie, but very hip. World-weary, but not broken. Brave, but not foolhardy. Idealistic, but not naïve. 

And, above all, ready to fight the system. 

Godspeed, Mr. Redford…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Deathworld Trilogy”

Cover art by David Egge

Harry Harrison’s Deathworld trilogy kept me sane during one long-ago summer when I was bored and lonely. As I recall, my father gave it to me, having bought it in an airport bookshop after a long trip. (Yes, he was a good dad.) 

Harrison is most famous for his Stainless Steel Rat series, but I liked these books better. As in all of Harrison’s work, the Deathworld stories center around a trickster anti-hero—in this case, Jason dinAlt, a smart, conniving rogue who is also telepathic. (He uses his E.S.P. to cheat at cards and thus travels from casino-to-casino, and planet-to-planet, having adventures but never a real job.) 

Looking back on it, I would bet that this cover by illustrator David Egge, depicting dinAlt in futuristic battle gear, had a lot to do with further popularizing the military science fiction sub-genre, of which Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is the best-known example. (Current examples are too numerous to name.) In fact, the Deathworld books are not military sci-fi. The characters dress like soldiers because they live on a very dangerous planet named Pyrrus (as in pyrrhic; get it?) where every living thing from plants to animals is lethal to humans. Indeed, the entire ecosystem of Pyrrus seems determined to kill all the human colonists, for reasons that dinAlt will try to discover using his telepathic powers as well as his finely honed survival skills.

The Deathworld books are just fun, well-plotted, fast-paced adventure stories, reminiscent of science fiction’s Golden Age—albeit with a bit more wit attached to them than the average sci-fi fair. Moreover, Harrison should be lauded for the series’ strong ecological message (well hidden, at first, but definitely in there), which was usual at the time, especially in “guy’s” books. 

Check them out…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “How to Save a Life”

I’ve been reading a fine biography of the great country singer Johnny Cash, and in its pages I learned that Elvis Presley (who befriended Cash when they were both starting out, both men having been discovered by the legendary Sam Phillips) could play the piano. Not as well, obviously, as Phillips’s other phenom, Jerry Lee Lewis, but well enough for Cash, Lewis, and Carl Perkins to sing a few songs together while Presley was tickling the ivories. (That impromptu harmony session was recorded by a quick-witted studio technician and has since become known as The Million Dollar Quartet.)

 As I learned about this, I was struck by the notion that most people don’t realize the outsized role that the piano, as an instrument, has played in the history of Rock and Roll. When people think of rock music, the probably think of guitars first, and then (maybe) drums. Somewhere along the line, keyboards some into, but probably the electronic kind. (Think of great synth work by The Cars or Steve Winwood or Gary Numan.) But the piano? The piano?

Yes, the piano. I would argue that it has been almost as influential as the electric guitar in the development of rock. Starting with Jerry Lee Lewis, the story goes to Elton John and Billy Joel, to Christine McVie and even Freddy Mercury. 

The 21st Century has, of course, seen a resurgence of the great piano-players in rock. Foremost among this has been Chris Martin of Coldplay. But for my money, The Fray is, in its best moments, just as good a band as Coldplay. Take this little, mournful, piano-driven gem, which is one of my favorite songs of the last twenty years.

Rock on…

What I’m Reading: “The Future Was Now”

In the summer of 1982, I was a very unhappy boy. Being a nerd in an upper-class high school full of preppies and jocks, I didn’t fit in very well. I hated most of my classes. I had a few good, close friends (including some jocks), but that was it. As one would expect, I spent a lot of time in my room reading sci-fi novels and typing short stories on the typewriter my mother had bought me. 

The only thing that kept me sane was movies. Fortunately, 1982 turned out to be the most incredible time in cinematic history to be a nerd. A string of classics came out that summer including Blade Runner, The Thing, The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Max Max II), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, and (the 800-pound gorilla) E.T. Even at the time, I was cognizant that this bumper crop of cool films, all coming out within a few weeks of each other, was a very unusual, almost magical development. I spent many hours on the bus with my friends going to and from the local cineplex, where we watched many of these films over and over. 

For forty years, I labored under the delusion that this rapid series of classics was just a lucky coincidence. But while reading Chris Nashawaty’s fine nonfiction book, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, I learned otherwise. A good historian will reveal that any event, no matter how seemingly incredible or unlikely, actually emerges logically from previous events. That is, the seeds were planted years or even decades before. And in 1982, main seed was a little film called Star Wars. As Nashawaty explains:

There’s an unwritten rule for reporters and trendwatchers who cover Hollywood that if you want to know why a movie—or a particular group of movies—was made, all you need to do is look back and see what was a hit at the box office five years earlier since that’s the typical gestation period for studio executives to spot a trend, develop and green-light an imitator, push it into production, and usher it into theaters. And the summer of 1982 would prove no exception, coming exactly five years after Star Wars. What seemed underreported, however, was how this new wave of sci-fi titles had been conceived and carried out. It is a wave that we’re still feeling the aftereffects of, for better and worse, today.

Continue reading “What I’m Reading: “The Future Was Now””

Orlando Trip De-Brief (with a Bit of Synchonicity)

Me with Danni and Michelle of the BCAD Podcast at the Barnes & Noble on Colonial

Well, Cathy and I got back from Orlando on Thursday, and this is the first chance I’ve had to write a post about it. All in all, it was a fine trip! My book talk at Barnes and Noble went well, mostly due to Danni and Michelle, the hosts of the excellent podcast Book Club After Dark, who were nice enough to interview me. They asked great, insightful questions, and I had a lot of fun. The turn-out was modest, but the people who did show up seemed really interested. They asked some great questions, too. It was especially nice to see my old friend Norm, who came to the event to cheer me on. He also snapped the picture above. 

Afterward, Cathy and I had a great dinner and some fine beers at the Harp and Celt Pub downtown. The next day, we did a driving tour of Orlando, Noland Twice’s home turf, refamiliarizing ourselves with our old stomping grounds. As one might expect, parts of the city seem completely different from when we lived there, while other parts seemed exactly the same. Overall, O-Town still feels like two cities. There’s the lovely, old, Southern city, with its tree-shaded streets and gorgeous houses from the 1930s and ‘40s. Then, there’s the litter-on-a-stick, urban sprawl of Generica, with its strip-malls and fast-food shacks and liquor stores. And traffic. Lots of traffic. The really sad part about Orlando is that you have to drive through the nasty bits to get to the nice, old, quaint bits. But oh well. I still love the city.

Catchup by the Pool by Slim Aarons (snapped from my phone in Orlando)

When we were done exploring, Cathy and I drove down Mills Avenue and visited the Mennello Museum of American Art, which is perhaps the best small museum I’ve ever visited. I was especially taken with their current exhibit, entitled Pool Party, which had lots of amazing photos and paintings of American pool culture from all over the country. I was especially taken with this 1970 photo, above, by former combat photographer Slim Aarons. It’s titled Catchup by the Pool, and it seems to encapsulate the entire upper-class, White, suburban culture of the U.S., right on the cusp between two equally garish decades. And yet, it’s also kind of…sweet. I find myself wanting to go to this party.

Screen Grab of a Random Speechify Ad from my Youtube Account

And then, just this morning, in one of those instances of synchronicity that seem to happen fairly often to me (and which I blog about, a lot), I happened to be presented with a YouTube ad (for Speechify, of all things). Before the skip button came up, I had to leave the room, so I paused the ad so I wouldn’t miss the beginning of the actual video I was waiting for. (Just to prove I wasn’t crazy, I did a screen grab, above left.)

When I came back, I noticed that there was something weirdly familiar about the freeze-frame that I happened to pause on. If you look at the background, on the wall of whatever apartment or motel room the ad was apparently filmed in, you can see—lo-and-behold!—the same photo by Slim Aarons. 

What are the odds? Like, a bazillion-to-0ne! Talk about synchronicity-on-steroids!

Anyway, it seemed like a magical end to a good trip.