Catching Up

Busy, busy...

But here are a few highlights from the books 'n movies front lately (as I scramble to get back into a regular schedule posting here... and in the rest of my productive life!).

Films:  Just saw the knuckle-biter Captain Phillips.  A very intense study of the real-life  story about Somali piracy.  Tom Hanks's performance is riveting.  I do wish the film makers had had the grace to cut away and end the film just a few minutes sooner - it just seems wrong to watch this tough character finally fall apart once he's saved.  He has every right to!  But give the guy some privacy, right?  The very human portrayal of the pirates makes the film, I think, turning this from just another action flick into art.  I'm hoping to see the other current crisis-on-the-sea movie, Robert Redford's All is Lost this weekend.

I tried watching This Is the End the other night on DVD.  I'm not at all the demographic the filmmakers were aiming for... but did anyone find this apocalyptic brat-pack film funny?  I could see it trying.  Pirates: Band of Misfits however, remains a light but amusing claymation/animation romp with a great alternative version of Queen Victoria.  Funny.

Books:  I lost steam in reading Telegraph Avenue.  Beautifully written, coming from Michael Chabon, but... after being interrupted I never quite got back into it.  I think because I can see the ending coming too clearly and don't (just personal taste) find the ambiance of jazz, blaxploitation/martial arts movies, midwifery, and Berkeley engrossing.  I may go reread The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay instead because I like the world of comics, golems, and Brooklyn better.  (Personal taste.)

I'm in a funny mood.  I want adventure and vicarious thrills, even a touch of the creeps.  Probably the Halloween/November weather.

I got all excited at the library because several authors I follow had new books.  Sadly these were all to some degree disappointing.  Charlaine Harris's last book in her Sookie Stackhouse series (basis for the True Blood TV show) was... O K.  It ended about as I thought it should, but I got the feeling the author herself was tired of the series well before it was actually all written.  (The TV show went off the rails completely at some point.)  I can, however, heartily recommend the first book Dead Until Dark as an entertaining stand-alone.  Then you may find yourself reading the whole saga just to see what happens to Sookie.

On the other hand, though I enjoyed the earliest Anita Blake vampire novels by Laurell K. Hamilton, the series... Well, first I stopped buying them, and after this last library trip I've now officially stopped bothering to check them out.  By page 15 or so it was clear the story has dwindled to boring vampire politics, confusing yet boring interpersonal relationships, or more sex... which reads like self-indulgence.  For me the books are now unreadable.  But the early ones?  The title of the first novel says it all: Guilty Pleasures.

Speaking of which... I'm working my way through a Buffy-thon.*  Enjoying it all over again.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course.  Now in mid season 4.  Then maybe Master and Commander again for further sea adventures.  Remember the fun film Cowboys and Aliens?  How about making a Pirates and Vampires?  Pure popcorn!

Und so weiter...

And so on.

The crush of theater work here has slowed a bit (I'm only behind on one, well two, shows at present) and I'm back from a quick flit to the seaside (shrimp!) and settling into my annual cool weather highly efficient work-mode.  Or so I tell myself, in a effort to become, you know, highly efficient.

So what's going on?

I'm off to Kitchen Dog in an hour to help strike Detroit.  I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do with all that sod!  On my board are final details for The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told at Uptown Players, which starts building soon, and designs for The Great American Trailer Park Musical for OMG Productions in [the greater] San Francisco [area].  

I'm presently reading a newish book by Michael Chabon called Telegraph Avenue... which I'm enjoying, but so far at least it hasn't bumped his Summerland off my "Chabon Favorites" shelf.  If you happen to be hot on jazz or Berkeley, however, it may become your fav.  Always a good writer.  I saw the movie Gravity recently - liked it.  A great sense of Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace as an unimaginable huge and hostile environment.  The admirable reliability of the Space Shuttles (a marvel of engineering, though, tragically, only mostly reliable) sorta let us earthbound onlookers forget just how inhospitable space IS.  This film reminds me.  i want to see the new pirates-meet-Tom-Hanks film but haven't gotten to yet.

But the thrill of my recent little beach trip was getting to see a poor quality photocopy of a map of Galveston Bay.  Unsigned... but then would he dare sign it? At the time he was both secretly working for the Spanish and against them.  Simultaneously he was working both-ends-against-the-middle with the Americans and the French.  And the Mexicans.  Plus Texan filibusters and Louisianans and who knows who else?  Pirating is complicated.

HERE's an earlier post on Lafon with a link to his most famous map.

Writer Michael Chabon

I've been enjoying his work for some time, but was prompted to write this post after rereading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

A good book (its Pulitzer is a hint in that direction maybe), but I'll admit it didn't really "get" me on first reading.  Or, more truthfully (because I did race through its pages doing nothing else until I finished it), I didn't really "get" it.

There is a lot in The Amazing Adventures, more levels, more sediment of... I hardly know what all, more than I expected or even wanted at that first reading.  I anticipated a sort of swashbuckler with comic book heroes, I think.  Comic book heroes are a major component, yes, but that's like saying flour determines the nature of cake - or pancakes - and then you're handed a plate of layer-flaky pastry, sticky with honey, rich with nuts, with a name that hints at ancient places and camel-caravans of spices through the Mysterious East and, at the same time, of the Mom-n-Pop convenience store down the street where there is a sticky tinfoil plate with stickier plastic wrap pulled tight over homemade squares of sweetness on sale for the PTA.

Phew.

Chabon's writing has that effect on me: afterwards the mundane is edged with an aura of the extraordinary.  He can write a novel with a comix title that somehow mixes bland '50s suburban marriage, super heroes, secret lives, magic and escapist skills, the south pole, the Holocaust, the love of a boy for his dad, surrealism, scholarship, closeted sexuality... into a silt as evocative as that formed into the Golem of Prague.

Cover for The Amazing Adventures, borrowed

All Chabon's work has this evocative, nostalgic quality.  His grocery lists must be interesting to read -  everything else he writes is.  Look for his essays and short stories, as well as his novels.  My favorite is probably Summerland, a "young-adult" novel of the sort you return to all your life.  (If you find an audio version read aloud by the author, grab it!)

Last words:  I'm teased by a relationship between Chabon's writing and Neil Gaiman's... still puzzling that out.  Oh, and HERE's an earlier post on Chabon's essay collection Maps & Legends.   Another about Chabon's Summerland, Gaiman's Neverwhere, and other stories HERE.

Truth, Lies, Stories, and Fiction

I just finished rereading Michael Chabon's Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Border Lands.

A thoughtful book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys (a good movie too).  Chabon is one of those writers whose career I follow.  (And whose books I buy, even sometimes in hardback - true fan-love.)  I really do love Chabon's mix of straightforward and fabulous fiction, the layering of myth and tall-tale that is characteristic of his writing.  These essays are fascinating discussions of the tangle of truth, lies, magician's sleight of hand, and curious exploration on the unmarked areas of the map that create fiction writing.

I'd say this book is a good-read for any serious reader of fiction, especially fantasy, and a must-read for any aspiring writer of the same.

First edition cover borrowed from Wikipedia