IN TIMES OF DRAGONS.

Time for a double album by Tori Amos. This isn’t a review. At this stage in her career, many reviews come in two flavours.
   One: Delighted. I haven’t enjoyed an album of hers so much since I listened to ALBUM OF HERS I ENJOYED SO MUCH.
   Two: Disappointed. I haven’t enjoyed an album of hers since LAST ALBUM OF HERS I ENJOYED.
   By the presence of these typed words, go with the idea that I consider this double album a hit. Here, we have an artist looking to the future and how the fuck we got there. So, yes, there are references to the past on this sonic sprawl of a musical map. One of those references I found jaw-dropping, but we’ll get to that bit.
   Direct musical reference that jumps off the album and slaps you hard with candy-floss? SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. Tori sang that on her first…I keep reminding myself of this. Her second first album. There was a first first album, but we don’t talk about that in case we frighten the horses. Y KANT TORI READ was her first first album. It died foaming at the mouth, shot in the street and left for the coyotes to fight over. The winning coyote feasted on the remains and then died of dysentery.
   Her album dived, bombed, dive-bombed, sank, tanked, stiffed, corpsed, croaked, and came into foot-based contact with the bucket. There’s this thing in Hollywoodland. You walk into a place and people stare at you to see if you are famous. Then the same people try not to look as though they’ve recognised you, presuming you are famous.
   After that awkward moment, people go back to their drinks, meals, drugs, or whatever entertains them on their phones in the dying minutes of a society that’s about to replace phones with brain implants.
   In Tori’s case, she’d appear on the scene and people instantly recognised her as the girl whose album just dived, bombed, dive-bombed, sank, tanked, stiffed, corpsed, croaked, and came into foot-based contact with the bucket. Awkward moment is awkward.
   So we don’t talk about that album as her first. It’s a pre-career foray into pleasing the record company and no one else. Come to think of it, not even the record company – pointing at its watch, and eyeing the contract for those other albums in the works.
   For a long time, I didn’t buy the damned thing. Hell of a long time. I guess talking to someone else who was really into her music, I learned it wasn’t the end of the world if you listened to those early tunes. By the time I bought the album, somewhere along the way, I’d learned that CYNTHIA ROTHROCK IS CHINA O’BRIEN.
   Tori reeled from how shitty the music business can be. Some diseases it’s best to catch early in life. So she hired herself out to sing on the soundtrack of Cynthia’s martial arts movie. I’m guessing I saw the film seconds before I encountered Tori’s first album, Little Earthquakes. We don’t talk about the earlier album.
   Y KANT TORI READ. Why can’t Tori spell? Then she’d be Tori Spelling. What of this album? There are enough prototype songs on there. With a spot of music production wizardry, hell, they wouldn’t be too out of place on Tori’s first two albums: Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink. After listening to the pre-album album, I realised the world kept rolling through space.
   Of interest to see where she was heading, certainly. Everything around the album was forced through the soul-destroyer, pressed into the cookie-cutter, and slapped against the wall of popular culture to see what would stick. Not much. She was fucking buried under over-production. No one came to the funeral, so she clawed her way back out.
   Not today, Satan, not today. And so she bounced off the headstone, felt the pain of seeing a blurry career inscription there, and carried the fuck on. Carrying on brought the world Little Earthquakes. Two songs behind her, Tori sings Silent all these Years. And many albums later, in these times, IN TIMES OF DRAGONS, Tori references that song.
   It’s one of several references to the past as a reflecting wall, distorted in the heat-haze, showing us how the fuck we reached the future. Yes, there’s a harpsichord. And when you hear it on this release, you are legally obliged to think of BOYS FOR PELE. The harpsichord album. PELE was so much more than that. The first album she produced. PELE was so much more than that.
   Incidentally, Tori placed a reference going back to an earlier work long before all this. BOYS FOR PELE gave us HEY JUPITER. The line took my leather off the shelf is a direct reference to Little Earthquakes and the song LEATHER. Fight me, internet, but not too hard. Play the songs. Peace in our time. You believe me, now. Wasn’t so difficult, was it?
   So. No. She’s not new to referencing earlier albums.
   Tori has played the harpsichord since BOYS FOR PELE gave us a song about a PROFESSIONAL WIDOW. But the harpsichord reference here is deliberately throwing us back to that place in space-time. Y’know the place. Where she threw men into the volcano for reasons of peace and understanding. BOYS FOR PELE is so much more than that.
   IN TIMES OF DRAGONS. Harpsichording back to earlier times. The jaw-dropping reference, if you know, you know, but we’ll never really know…is a reference to an album, a band, the lead singer of that band. Holy fuck. What is going on here?
   This line, from the first track, SHUSH…
   Preamble. Before we hit the line, Tori asks CAN I LIVE THROUGH THIS? Okay. Let’s list the line. Courtney, thank you. The album referenced is Live Through This, by the band HOLE, fronted by Courtney Fucking Love. What was the feud about? Was there ever really a feud? If you know, you know. But we’ll never truly know.

YOKO ONO: Why the fuck do they all hate me so much?

COURTNEY FUCKING LOVE: Hold my fucking beer that I just pissed in. Wait. It’s someone else’s beer. Hold it anyway. I’ll come back and piss in it. Like an autograph. You’ll want to freeze that. For posterity and shit. I’ll come back and shit in the piss in the beer before you freeze it. Wait there.

Tori and Courtney had a feud. Or didn’t have one. If they’d never met, where was this feud? How could they feud with a door between them…how close did they come to meeting? And who was it all about? Trent Reznor? Was he the war-wounded neutral Swiss teddy bear these two fought over, with everyone discarding everyone else long before the non-dust settled, and tell-all tell-nothing songs written after the non-fact…just subtracted from the lore…
   I don’t know. The whole thing plays out like an alternative universe history, stuck in a feverish supervillain movie. Occasionally, the supervillain action is punctuated by intrusive superhero moments, but the villains soon triumph. We can rewind as much or as little as we like. All we can genuinely say is…there’s a persistent idea of a feud that involved those three people or none of those three people. Mr Reznor, that TRON album, though.
   But to reference an album by HOLE and to follow it up with a thank you to Queen Courtney. Yes, that’s jaw-dropping. The harpsichord callback. Many other ingredients here. A lot of looking at things way over yonder in that other country of the past. They record things differently there.
   That girl who wrote and sang SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. Where did she go? Across the world. What did she see? More things to write songs about.
   There’s rumbling, grumbling, from people who preferred her early work. “When she was angry.” You do know she’s angrier now, right? She sets fire to pianos by playing them, not soaking them in petrol. Anger is a scalpel in her hand. Before, in the early work, it was a flamethrower on her back. And I’m all for the flamethrower, believe me. But the scalpel is the tool of choice, now, when it comes to anger. And it is a delight to hear Tori wield it.
   I didn’t come here to review the album, or her other albums. Though I quickly revisited Little Earthquakes, BOYS FOR PELE, from the choirgirl hotel and Unrepentant Geraldines. And I heartily recommend you do the same. I always misremember from the choirgirl hotel as greetings from the choirgirl hotel. Can’t seem to shake that. (Phrasing from an earlier blog post that’s seared into my brain.)
   Underrated Geraldines. I underrate that one myself. It’s a hazy misty experience walking away from it. When I return to it, I remember the album while I’m there. Now choirgirl, documenting turmoil, stays with me long after the music stops. IN TIMES OF DRAGONS sent me back through a winding path that looks different now, from way over here in the future.
   The sparkles on the pathway are the same. But the path itself changed, with time’s perspective. What does the album imagery remind me of, in the accompanying booklet? The artwork of Dave McKean. I’ll just leave that thought on the part of the pathway blocked off by thorns, nature’s defence mechanism telling us to go around, and move on.
   What of my retrospective, in light of listening to the dragon-themed songs? I paid particular attention to BOYS FOR PELE and the song PROFESSIONAL WIDOW. And I still don’t know. We’ll never know.
   What we do know, though, is that Tori sings to and about Courtney Love this time around. The themes, the concept to the concept double album, these I leave you to discover, uncover, ponder, meander across, and wade through by yourself. What I really came here to talk about…was this. Technical issues.
   I took the CD from the cardboard, as I’ve done countless times when opening albums up to inspection. Love me some physical media. I had a decision ahead of me. Pop the disc into a machine that would play music. Or pop the disc into a machine plugged into my computer, and rip the CD to my hard drive.
   Just so you know. When I pay for a CD, I can legally make a back-up copy for my own emergency use. Tori isn’t done out of her royalty payment. I get to play the album without hunting around for it. If the CD pressing rots away, I have my back-up in the fantastical musical archive. Emergency thwarted. Inconvenience foiled. Some companies give you digital access to a copy through Amazon when you buy the disc anyway. Lose the Amazon account, though, and. Smell that? I love the smell of physical media in the morning.
   Which brings me to the fantastical musical archive known as Windows Media Player: it is not what it once was. I liked the best version best, and everything “updated” and “improved” after that has been, frankly, rubbish. Summary. I decided to rip both discs, one after the other.
   First, I turned the volume off. The music starts up during the ripping process. Didn’t want to hear the album ahead of hearing the album. I’d copy both discs, and then start playing.
   Well, I copied both discs over. (Or did I?) In the olden times, you’d copy the disc and all the information sat there. Album. Artist. Year of first publication. Titles of every track. You didn’t have to type nuthin’. Nuthin’, I tells ya. That’s all changed. Scoured away. You can’t search for it and match it all up from internet sources. Laboriously, you must type everythin’. Everythin’, I tells ya.
   I glanced at the track titles on the cardboard. Information, just waiting. First of the two album listings. Last track caught my eye. STRAWBERRY MOON. I wouldn’t look to the lyrics until I’d listened to the music. So there I am. The music is queued up and ready. I have to make the time to listen to it, and I do.
   Of course I enjoy the album. Double album. Concept. What am I looking for? Tori putting the word girl into yet another song. Anything else? Tori putting the word here into yet another song. She does...and she does.
   First disc. That last track, though. It builds like a full song, but it stops short abruptly, leaving me wanting more. I guess that’s her aim. Leave the listeners hungry and then dive on in, tackling the second disc. Right? It stays with me. STRAWBERRY MOON. Ominous. Lasts about 22 seconds.
   Then I am into the second album. Builds and builds. Theme. Musical styles. The piano. I came for the piano, and stayed for the harpsichord. After that, there was no walking away from Tori’s work. Harpsichord. Damn. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
   It is time to go back in and do all the typing for the musical archive. And I see that the first album is one track short. Technical difficulties. Wait. Which track is missing? If STRAWBERRY MOON is 22 seconds and there’s something missing, then the copying procedure cut out before ripping the whole album. I do some cross-referencing, and I find tracks with each duration listed.
   Okay. STRAWBERRY MOON never made it to the computer at all, and the 22 seconds I listened to…that slice came from a song called VEINS: it cut off at a pause in the lyrics that left me thinking this was an incredibly bold move for a song – just fucking stopping. Even by Tori’s standards, way out there. And she’s way out there. Obviously, I didn’t know it was a pause in the lyrics. To me, the whole thing stopped. Now I knew better.
   Time to fix this. I added the two full songs to the album. What I thought was the STRAWBERRY MOON, up close, proved to be VEINS. Not STRAWBERRY MOON at all. Then it was time to listen to STRAWBERRY MOON. And that’s when the album spoke to me. Throwing in a joke. For the hell of it.
   Out of the aether, and I do love me some aether, came the words: THAT IS NOT STRAWBERRY MOON! I know many a true word is spoken in jest, but, fucking hell…

 

REVISITING A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Upon revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird, reading the graphic novel, I decided to revisit another story adapted by the same artist – Fred Fordham. And so…
   I turned to A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. No Tolkien world-building here. Her creation is made of earth and sea rather than a vast continent, and features a mighty wizard in the days when he was not so mighty. It takes hard work to furnish a tale that’s an easy read. And I’d throw in the use of heavy thought to create a world as though made with a light touch.
   It wasn’t made with a light touch. Ursula used sleight-of-pen to give the impression that it all came easily to her. There’s no Gandalf here, or any of that wizard’s predecessors. No Merlin. And yet…
   Ursula gave herself over to the notion of a very famous magician. What was he like, back when he wore short trousers? Merlin, the Boy Wizard. How do you tell adventures of Gandalf the Kid? Do you just let the youngster magick his way around the world, or is there some mystical college you send these young enchanters to?
   Her story is not a story of Gandalf. More of a question. Where do all these Gandalfs and Merlins and Väinämöinens come from? Earthsea is about getting away from the overly-familiar story of a powerful wizard, especially in using the basic building blocks of wizardy tales. The quest, in Ursula’s fiction, is internal.
   Gandalf serves the rhythm of a mighty quest against relentless evil. And that’s a tale of Frodo’s exploits more than it is a tale of Gandalf’s. Merlin is a frequent visitor to another character’s story: Arthur – the Boy King.
   Strip that powerful wizard stuff away. Start with the foolish youth who has a point to prove to the world and to himself by showing he is no foolish youth. Watch as the future legend falls flat on his face in the early days, the youthful fool.
   Ursula’s story is one of magic. Magic comes to the forefront of this book. Authors are notorious for writing stories packed with magic rules…that serve the plot at the time, flash-in-the-pan style. Very much of the moment. The moment passes, and the rules of magic are altered, misplaced, forgotten, revived, reversed…
   Maybe there’s precious little magic in the fantasy world. There’d still be a place for wizards. And they’d be powerful, no matter how little magic they made use of.
   Bill Seligman, in a piece published in 1977, put rules to the framework of Tolkien’s magic by slotting Gandalf into the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. Going by Gandalf’s exploits in the books, and turning to the D&D magic system, Seligman proposed that Gandalf was no more powerful than a fifth level Magic-User.
   (March, 1977. The Dragon: GANDALF WAS ONLY A FIFTH LEVEL MAGIC-USER. I’ve sworn off footnotes. There’s an overwhelming sense of wanting to use them for comedy purposes alone, and no good would come of that.)
   Some context, for non-gamers. Your wizardy chappie starts out at first level and, through adventure after adventure, rises in level, power, and stature. Broadly, the first three levels of the character’s game-life are about survival. The next three levels offer more options for adventure. Truly powerful world-altering characters are of much higher level. So, in a game sense, at fifth level, Gandalf would be versatile, but not awesome.
   This doesn’t track with the reputation Gandalf wields in Tolkien’s world. There’s a very good reason for that. Roleplaying games are not novels. The concept of the hobby as a business did not exist when Tolkien finished writing The Lord of the Rings.
   Tolkien died in 1973 as Dungeons & Dragons was being put together for publication in 1974. Several Tolkien-based references appeared in early D&D and had to be removed on pain of litigation. Hobbits were out. Halflings came in. It was that or pay Saul Zaentz a load of money.
   Official Tolkien roleplaying games came and went, as rights were rented out or expired. (While I sat typing this, an advert for a Tolkien-themed roleplaying game dropped into my e-mail.) Each new game offers a magic system. Magic exists in Tolkien’s writing. But it doesn’t match the magic system used in D&D. That takes inspiration from the writing of Jack Vance.
   D&D magic has literal rules to it. Much of the spellcasting is flashy. You’d increase the movie budget significantly just by welding D&D magic onto The Lord of the Rings. There’s before The Lord of the Rings in terms of fantasy stories and there’s after. There’s also before Dungeons & Dragons and after.
   Today, if you feel like writing a fantasy novel, you might delve into a game rulebook or two for ideas on how magic works in a setting. D&D magic is casual. Magic = spells, and spells are plentiful. You’d ignore how spells distort the world, only concerning yourself with how spells save the characters, or else you’d embrace the chaos…
   Do you need hospitals in your fantasy world if magic healing is plentiful? If you can create water on a whim, the Great Inaccessible Desert doesn’t sound so uncrossable after all. Turning lead into gold will flood the market. So the magician who can do this is a threat to society as a whole. He must be stopped. Or bought off. Not with gold, though. I see a flaw in there, somewhere.
   Magic has rules. Story demands structure.
   Back to Ursula. She, too, was writing before the first copy of D&D was sold, and didn’t need to consider the game of magic. Incidentally, if Gandalf is only fifth level in a game…which edition of the game would that be? Just let it go.
   All a writer has to do is consider the blank page. Ursula had to rewrite the wizard story, rather than just write it. And so. Our hero, Ged, is powerful. He’s heading places. The future is awesome. But first, the early years. Conflict. Drama. Tension. Mistakes. Learning from some of those mistakes. Making more mistakes.
   Magic, in Earthsea, comes at a price. There is balance. And if you push the balance in your favour, the balance shoves back. In this way, Ursula doesn’t trap herself into writing up a D&D spellbook. (Though, if she’d done that, Gary Gygax would’ve certainly perked up his ears and started scribbling notes.) Instead, she shows that magic is about making choices. Also. Actions have consequences.
   The magic in Earthsea is one of the most elegant depictions of magic I’ve encountered. Edward Eager, let’s call him an American disciple of E. Nesbit, gave us Half Magic. Magic wishes abound in the tale, but only at half-strength and for comedy. Characters wishing to benefit from full wishes have to double the description to gain the full wish. This also leads to comedy, and trouble. Yes, Hijinks. Shenanigans. Misadventures.
   Eager controls the rules with an iron glove. Tolkien has a loose hand on the tiller. C.S. Lewis provides this bit of magic here and that bit of magic there. Some of the magic is very old and deep, and woe unto ye if you seek to quote the rules of magic to any entity who was there when the deep magic was written.
   Ursula…gives us balance. A quest for equilibrium in an ever-changing world. Action and reaction. She sciences this up. There is a cost to making magical alteration. You could see an ecological theme in here. (For it exists.) What does magic cost the magician? Is there anything in the awkwardness of a young wizard’s journey that’s going to teach the much older character when looking back?
   A Wizard of Earthsea barely reminds me of anything else. It feels fresh. New. There are, perhaps, a few touchstones. Ursula wasn’t born when John Masefield wrote The Midnight Folk. Susan Cooper’s magical cycle, The Dark is Rising, shares something with John Masefield and Ursula le Guin. There’s a sense of flow.
   Random events in The Midnight Folk tune themselves into a sense of flow. And that goes on in Susan Cooper’s books. It seems to be everything in Ursula’s story. Granted, the flow is aided by the maritime nature of the tale.
   It’s not something I can put a finger on, and point to, in an illuminated manuscript. I sensed it, and I recognised something similar in the writings of Masefield and Cooper. Tolkien’s world is too vast, detailed, and intricate to give me that particular sense of flow. The gears grind slowly and relentlessly in Tolkien’s grand design.
   C.S. Lewis offers a mosaic feel to the tales set in far-off Narnia. Not this vague notion I’m trying to convey. Perhaps the vagueness in conveying it is part of the atmosphere. But even here, in good company, Masefield and Cooper, there’s a distinction worth making.
   Tolkien, certainly with The Hobbit, where his saga began, E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis, John Masefield, Susan Cooper…all have had this label applied at some point. They wrote books for children. To some, the Earthsea books are seen as for children.
   No. Recreating a story of wizards and magic so that it seems new, fresh, and hard to pin down…was not something Ursula did for children. Granted, children weren’t banned from reading those books. If you had the stomach for it as a child, maybe you gained something from The Lord of the Rings. And if you discovered The Chronicles of Narnia as an adult, you weren’t breaking any laws.
   Some books read in childhood may interest you enough to return to them when you are older and supposedly wiser, it’s true. I realise I’ve not mentioned the plot. Haven’t I, though? Ged is a young wizard, in need of training.
   He magicks his way through a maritime world, and learns the hard way that magic has a cost. Ged learns that striking the right balance is a difficult thing, hard to pin down. He heads off on a quest of his own making, for he is his own worst enemy and must leave to confront the error of his ways.
   Oh, yes, and something about a dragon. I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself if you haven’t read the book. The graphic novel adaptation is another John Fordham work. What to say of adaptations? I’ve seen adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the sequel to The Midnight Folk – The Box of Delights – some stuff by E. Nesbit, nothing by Edward Eager…and I’ve only seen the trailer for a fucking awful attempt at The Dark is Rising.
   Yes, I can judge the movie as quite awful based entirely on the atrocious trailer. It would make you reach for a Susan Cooper book if you felt in need of an antidote to the travesty on screen. Which takes me…nowhere. Certainly not in the direction of adaptations of Ursula’s works.
   I haven’t watched any of that stuff. And I won’t watch any of that stuff. If you seek an adaptation, try the graphic novel. There’s a sense of scale to the world, an atmosphere of menace in even considering the use of magic. And character aplenty.
   What level of wizard would Ged be, in a Dungeons & Dragons game? He wouldn’t be in a D&D game at all. (Ged faces the challenge of a dragon in one book. And there’s a dungeon later, but we mustn’t run ahead of the story sequence.) As I type, there is no commercial roleplaying game based on A Wizard of Earthsea. There’s the book, and a graphic novel adaptation. Steer clear of the moving image for now. Perhaps someone with passion for the story will take a decent crack at the whole series, one day. On big screen, or small.

 

HEAT 2: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Wading into a movie by Michael Mann. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
   And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. Why? He’s a Michael Mann Man. And he uses a lot of…Michael Mannerisms.
   His name is Frank. The movie is Thief. In another diner his name is Neil. The movie is HEAT. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
   And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. He knows that whatever time he gets…is luck.
   In the Miami Vice movie, Gong Li manages to tell us, twice over, that TIME IS LUCK. This blog post is hidden in the wheel well, to fool you into thinking it’s the only one.
   HEAT 2 is the book prequel/sequel to a movie by Michael Mann. We’ll see if the book is made into a movie sequel. The one thing stopping that would be Mann’s death. He’s 83 as I type this, and I guess he’s looking to make one last big score. Whatever time he gets is luck. So. What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China?
   To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse.
   The book is a sequel to a movie. Think on that for a second. There is no novelisation of the film itself. That throws a few curves into what should otherwise be a straight road of a book. Mann teamed up with a novelist to bring HEAT 2 to life.
   I don’t know which novelist for sure, but a casual glance at the internet hints at two writers being in the frame for the job: both men. When the collaboration finally hit the shelves, crime writer Meg Gardiner had her name on the cover.
   HEAT 2 is the first Meg Gardiner book I’ve read. I’ve watched an unholy amount of Michael Mann movies, television products, and analysis of same. Mann likes to fix things after the cinema release of a movie.
   No. Better to say that he hates to fix things, but he fixes. So Frank, contemplative, looking on a seascape from an alien world, comes from a scene restored to Thief. Filmed, but cut out for the cinema. Sometimes things go the other way...
   Mann removed the word detritus from HEAT. It’s there in HEAT 2. The word stood out in Mann’s movie, was conspicuous by its absence when cut, and is therefore notable for its appearance in the Meg Gardiner collaboration.
   Again. To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse. Okay, maybe Meg Gardiner’s readership came on over to see what the fuss was about. But. This book is for people who have seen and enjoyed the film. That’s a bare minimum requirement.
   It helps if you’ve watched…
   The Jericho Mile.
   Thief.
   Manhunter.
   Miami Vice for television and the Miami Vice movie.
   Crime Story. L.A. Takedown. Robbery Homicide Division. Luck. Tokyo Vice. All for television.
   The car advert with Benicio del Toro. This is for Mercedes-Benz, with the title Lucky Star.
   Go beyond HEAT and watch the deleted scenes from that movie as well.
   Then there’s the cluster of films: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, both cuts of Blackhat, and interviews with Michael Mann.
   Yes, all the other stuff. He had a hand in The Kingdom. It feels like a Michael Mann film. Speaking of which, I’d recommend To Live and Die in L.A. It’s an attempt at a Michael Mann movie without Mann as the director. This features William L. Petersen, who has a bit-part in Thief and is the Michael Mann Man in Manhunter.
   What else? All the other stuff I didn’t mention. The Last of the Mohicans, and so on. If you want to go above and beyond the call of duty in watching a series put together by a bunch of people who went above and beyond the call of duty, there’s the gargantuan ONE HEAT MINUTE, which analyses HEAT cinematically, one minute at a time.
   I’d think about the length of the movie before you even contemplate diving deep on that one. Every minute of a very long movie is given its own episode. If you think you have the patience to handle a 40-minute discussion of one minute of film footage, try it on. And on and on. Half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour…minute by filmic minute.
   An unholy amount of content, right there.
   Where to start? Chuck Adamson. Chicago police. On the hunt for Neil McCauley and his whole fucking crew. Adamson co-created Crime Story for television. You’ll spot him in the movie Thief, on which he advised. He told Mann a whole bunch of anecdotes…
   Neil McCauley was a criminal who called off a heist when he heard a sound in an empty building. McCauley correctly realised the noise was from cop surveillance on the site. This story is worked into the movie HEAT. The cops and the robbers know who they are in this whole situation. Adamson meets the criminal on the street and decides to have coffee with McCauley.
   That scene becomes the biggest scene in HEAT. I know. For some of you, the action is the juice. I’ll settle for it…you know what I mean…I’ll buy that. Moving on. Adamson is in on an ambush of a heist, leaving McCauley and his crew nowhere to go. One guy temporarily escapes. At the movies, he becomes the character of Chris. Adamson shoots McCauley dead.
   Mann writes it up as a script of 180 pages. In the movie business, a page of script generates one minute of film. The time isn’t right, the stars don’t align, so he guts the script and turns it into a television movie called L.A. Takedown.
   Pre-production on a project is a huge thing for Mann. He spent longer filming the bank scene in HEAT than he spent on pre-production for the TV movie version. It took days to film for television and months to make the story fit on the big screen.
   Mann recycles things. Xander Berkeley is on television in Miami Vice. He’s Waingro in L.A. Takedown. And he’s a very nervous Ralph in HEAT. Ralph’s actions lead to the destruction of a television set. You’ll find that scene in Crime Story.
   What’s my point? If you had to write a prequel/sequel to a Michael Mann movie, you’d have to deliver a lot of Michael Mannerisms. You’d need to serve up a montage. Highlights. There’d be no way around that.
   But it’s okay. Mann did that already, across movies and television. Driven men, good at what they do, do bad things. They stare at water. Obsess over time, and luck, and the price of tea in China. They are Michael Mann Men.
   And they must deal with Michael Mann Women. There are two types of Michael Mann Woman. The first: she’s seen some shit. And the second: she’s not seen any shit, but she’s gonna see a shitload of shit soon. None of this ends well.
   In HEAT, Diane Venora plays Justine. She’s married to the driven detective, out on the edge, Vincent Hanna. It’s Diane who has her line about detritus cut from the movie. She gives a great speech after everyone’s gone home.
   The detective returns to the restaurant to pick up his wife after dealing with the fallout of Waingro’s murderous inclinations. Waingro of the television movie is incredibly different from Waingro of the big screen outing.
   Justine lays into Vincent and his inability to be there. (Vital, given Vincent’s command to a snitch to BE THERE elsewhere in this film.) Justine’s speech is riveting. It nails Vincent to the restaurant floor. Sets out his faults. He responds by stating, pretty much, that these faults are assets in the hunt for criminals.
   Faults, in trying to keep a marriage going. His third. HEAT unfolds with criminal inevitability. Cop and robber are tuned in to an exclusively shared frequency. Both understand each other. More than that. They understand that they are the only two players on this field who understand each other. This field is the entire world. A whole planet, and only these two guys relate to their opposites.
   How do we know they are opposites? Vincent Hanna picks up a gun and leaves his home. Neil McCauley arrives home and sits a gun down. Both are driven men on opposite sides of the law. Mann spells it out using everything. Cinematography. Sound. Editing. The guns, clothes, everything. Both men, home, strike a pose on opposite sides of the law. This is all deliberate.

In the case of Neil McCauley, we’re treated to his scene contemplating water in a colour called Michael Mann Blue™^. What is this? It signifies mood, setting, terrain, forthcoming actions, choices, mistakes within choices, and fate. Mann recycles this colour or variations of it across his works.
   The movie leads to a clash. And, leading away from that clash, into possibilities. Clash. The bank robbery goes to hell. Only Neil and Chris make it out, and Chris is barely in any shape to carry on. All Neil has to do is drive to the airport and he’s gone. Possibilities.
   But he’s not the guy to let things go. His way out is for absolutely ever. Never coming back. A multimillionaire. He’s off to Fiji, to stare into the ocean and contemplate life. Except. He has to kill Waingro, who set him up to take the biggest fall. And so he does stop by to kill Waingro.
   Neil has brought a woman to the scene of the impending crime. Eady is the Michael Mann Woman who has not seen any shit. From the moment Neil is exposed as a participant in an ultra-violent robbery, Eady sees a shitload of shit. And none of that ends well for her.
   Adamson killed McCauley. The movie gives us the same story. Cop kills robber. It’s a Warner Brothers movie, by way of Regency. Turns out that crime does pay, but at what cost? Neil’s friend Chris escapes, knowing he can never be with his wife or child again. And? There’s a prequel/sequel book to this? Where the fuck can that even go?
   We’re told on the cover that the book deals with 1988 to 2000. Meg Gardiner had to give the audience the Michael Mannverse. But that’s okay. Michael Mann already handed us that. It is difficult, to move fixed pieces into a story. Playing with someone else’s building blocks, according to certain – very certain – rules and expectations.
   Clearly, Meg Gardiner faced the same problem everyone else ever had with Michael Mann. He’s thorough. Driven. I guess he stares at seas, oceans, lakes. Contemplating his existence. HEAT featured pretty rough shooting locations. Anyone who worked on that movie and The Last of the Mohicans just shrugged it all off.
   What did Meg Gardiner do? She got on with it, and had a blast. Is it a Michael Mann crime story? Yes, it is. What must that feature? The idea that time is luck. We tick that box off. Someone must stare out into water and contemplate the meaning of things.
   Movie: Mann gives us Neil McCauley staring out at water. Michael Mann Blue™^. Book: Meg Gardiner offers us the detective, Vincent Hanna, discovering the same location and staring out at the same body of water.
   We have confirmed lore. It is hinted at, in Al Pacino’s performance as Hanna, that the detective indulges in cocaine from time to time. We had this revelation in discussions of the movie. It’s in the book as part of the official fabric of the story.
   There are loads of tiny details here, from across the Mannverse. I mentioned deleted scenes from HEAT. One is a short but memorable sequence with a visit to a fence/informant in a place packed with cheap television sets. Cut. Gone. Lost.
   Recycled as a scene for use in the book.
   How does the story unfold? It opens with the consequences of the bank job. Eady has seen some shit. She puts in an appearance to tie off a loose end or two. Then she’s out. Justine and her daughter Lauren are given a few moments in the narrative.
   We learn that Vincent Hanna did not divorce all of his wives. One died. Does this contradict the movie? When Nate is discussing Hanna’s career with Neil McCauley, there’s a mention of two divorces. Current wife is Justine. Maybe Nate got the details wrong. Nate makes a few errors of judgement in the movie.
   He misjudges a businessman, leading to the betrayal at the bank. And he misjudges Neil, in giving away Waingro’s location…believing that Neil won’t give a shit. Neil gives a shit and blows Waingro away – creating the inevitable cops-and-robbers collision that ends the film. So here and there, Nate slips up.
   Looking back, I liked the use of current wife in the movie. It’s a small set-up for Justine’s ejection from Vincent’s life. Maybe he’s into women on Prozac. This is where he goes wrong. There’s a scene near the start of the film with Hanna in a stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building. Hanna being asked about…well, being there…and he has to duck that responsibility to go and fight crime. So he dashes downstairs.
   And we have that near the end of the film. Hanna in a very stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building: now a hospital rather than a home. And another conversation about, y’know, being there. He dashes downstairs to fight crime.
   Maybe his earlier wife had just barely divorced him and he still thought of her as his wife when he raced to be with her as she died. That would square away the story.
   Where are these characters in the book? Justine, Lauren, and Eady are mentioned. But there’s a shift in focus to the flashback. It’s 1988, and Neil is still alive. Still taking down scores. He has another Michael Mann Woman to encounter. She’s seen some shit.
   Chris meets his future wife Charlene for the first time, and becomes obsessed with her. She’s seen some shit. The other members of the crew, Michael and Trejo, are given almost no time in the story.
   It’s Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Hanna blew a guy away there, and we’re talking about a fucking maniac. Expect violence. Loose ends? In the immediate aftermath of the bank robbery in the nineties, we have Hanna not doing something.
   Waingro’s corpse is on a slab. There’ll be a DNA sample to try to tie him to unsolved crimes. He’ll be revealed as the serial killer Hanna was tracking in a movie subplot. We never reach that scene.
   Back to the eighties, in Chicago. Here are scenes we’ll never get, for reasons of story integrity. Hanna can only have a vague brush up against Neil and his crew. That must be maintained and it is maintained. Playing with other people’s building blocks.
   The narrative needs a Waingro villain. And it gets one. Neil is in town, planning to take down scores. The home invader, Wardell, is Waingro – but packing double the worst trouble anyone ever had. Neil is interested in scores. Wardell becomes interested in Neil. Hanna is there to take down Wardell. All sorts of cats running around after mice.
   Hanna is with the Chicago force. The only familiar person on his crew is Casals, who leaves Chicago with Vincent Hanna and goes to Los Angeles for the movie portion of the story. We get virtually nothing on Casals as a character.
   This is the Neil show, the Hanna show, and the Chris show, with Wardell flitting between sideshow and main show. There’s a theme here, concerning Wardell. In the movie HEAT, Hanna has a cop on his crew: Bosko.
   Bosko is played by Ted Levine. A Michael Mann regular. In Crime Story, Ted Levine plays a villain who just keeps getting away. And I was reminded of that character thread in this book. Crime Story is Chicago, through and through. In HEAT 2, Wardell, as scummy as he is, just keeps getting away.
   This is foreshadowing. Introduce your villain in the flashback. Give Neil and Chris more character background. Show that Vincent Hanna is the edgiest cop on the edge. Build Wardell as a stone killer.
   In the past, the action is the juice. We’re concerned with a high-risk score that has to go just right or everyone is dead. It’s taking the cartel’s money and vanishing into nowheresville, fast.
   This more or less plays out okay. What’s not okay is Wardell, who has cut into this crew. His plan is to throw his men at Neil’s men, post-heist, and reap the rewards.
   Everything is fucked up. We see why Neil avoids attachment after this. His crew has to fade away. Wardell, being the villain we’ll definitely return to in the future, escapes with loot. Building blocks. Plot set-ups. It’s very Chicago.
   Belongs to the Thief and Crime Story segments of Mann’s career. HEAT, before there was HEAT. This part of the job, Meg Gardiner does well. She does the other part well, too, but…before we even get into that…
   Time passes. Many characters are dead and gone. Vincent Hanna is still in Los Angeles, with his crew. Drucker. Casals. Who is left? Nate. Chris. His wife Charlene. We go through what happened to Chris and where he is now. Building a criminal empire. Staying away from his wife. Longing for her. In the movie…
   This part is super important. On the run, Chris can’t resist trying to see Charlene. It’s a trap. The cops are waiting. Charlene gives a signal. Warns him off. He drives out. Cops brace him on the street anyway.
   His identity holds up. And then we see him lost in despair in his car, as he is about to head off into a new life – leaving Charlene behind for eternity. That’s what we take away from the movie. The Michael Mann Woman sends the Michael Mann Man away. Cut and dried. That is it.
   So where can this book go? Wisely, it sticks to that level of finality. Chris does distantly see Charlene again through a window. They talk on the phone, but that is all.
   He knows he still has to let her go as the book unfolds. This could have been easy to fuck up. But finality is finality. We don’t want them to get back together, and we don’t need that. The characters don’t need that.
   Instead, we have this new criminal empire. It carries Chris back to Los Angeles. He wants to take down Vincent Hanna. Wardell resurfaces as the villain. What’s the tone of this later part of the book?
   It is generated from a cluster of movies: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and both cuts of Blackhat. For the cops-and-robbers stuff, you have Public Enemies. Mann occasionally dipped into biographical pictures. John Dillinger died in Chicago, so this is very Chicago.
   As for the other stuff. The Insider and Ali both feature dense layers of paranoia. Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat are certainly involved in crime…but they give us something different. Collateral does what HEAT did before. It made Los Angeles seem new, fresh, showing us a hidden visual side to Hollywoodland that’s normally so generic in cinema.
   Pause for thought. HEAT did that. And then Collateral did that, all over again. Fresh, twice. Which brings me to Meg Gardiner. She has to give us these characters again. Fresh, twice over. So she leans heavily into areas that interested Mann to a greater degree in his later films. Oh, he was always interested in this stuff.
   However, there’s a shift from the earlier work. This exists in Collateral to an extent, but comes to the forefront in Miami Vice and leaps from the screen in Blackhat. Massive criminal organisations. Heavy on the tech-stuff. No borders. International activity.
   Electronics to the left of you, computers to the right, and people in the shadows. Driven. Dedicated. With high-end skill-sets.
   It’s hard to write about Miami Vice without stating underrated, or deserves a second look. Maybe check out the alternative cut of the movie. Barry Shabaka Henley, and we’ll call him a Michael Mann regular, is one of America’s best-kept acting secrets. He’s part of a cast dedicated to bringing the story to life.
   There are Michael Mann fans who walked away from fare like Miami Vice, Blackhat, and the television show Luck. “Mann had lost his touch.” They want HEAT. Okay. HEAT 2 isn’t for those people. HEAT 2 is for people who were into HEAT, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat.
   I know Blackhat is a hard sell. Cyber crime. Was it a movie out of time? Right on the edge of what was happening, and yet somehow a decade ahead of itself?
   A movie that was going to inform the mainstream audience of internet criminality’s all-pervasive threat – all the way up to government level. No one wanted to know. Shit like that’s all over the news on the daily, these days. In the fabric of existence, at breakfast and on through to sunset and after.
   If you don’t like Miami Vice or Blackhat, I have news for you. Put the HEAT movie on. Enjoy what you have. No one has ruined your movie experience. Coming up into the year 2000, HEAT 2 gives you a party like it’s 1999 vibe.
   Songs are referenced. But beyond those, you can feel the soundtrack. Mann sometimes employs multiple composers for his movie work. Across different eras, I could see Mann dividing the musical tasks accordingly. A little bit of Elliot Goldenthal here, James Newton Howard there, Lisa Gerrard with Pieter Bourke. Maybe the unused finale track Goldenthal created for HEAT. Mann likes to recycle, after all.
   Would HEAT 2 work as a movie? To get the job done, it’s pretty much a full recast of HEAT. Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, and Tom Noonan are gone. Noonan would have been a great return actor: the character of Kelso has a cyber security role to play in the book.
   The book works as a book. Once you are through the immediate aftermath of the bank heist in 1995, and the building of a villain back in 1988, the conflict escalates into 2000. Mann wasn’t happy, having to change the finale of Miami Vice. You can see the locations being used in the book. Unfinished business for Mann, perhaps.
   Things go phenomenally bad in Neil’s past. We are treated to the origin of Neil’s desire to visit Fiji. He never gets there. Chris is the one who is home-free at the end of the movie.
   In the book, the three-way firefight involving Vincent, Chris, and the beyond evil Wardell…that’s the payoff to Chris setting up a new life for himself. He’s closing in on a big score so that he can get out. But he turns from that to take a chance on extinguishing the detective who killed his buddy.
   If you can’t stand Miami Vice, this is no-go for you. Same for Blackhat. That’s on the basis that Chris involves himself in the life of a Michael Mann Woman. It’s a lengthy sequence. He has to be doing SOMETHING that’s going on far from Los Angeles. And if that global cyber criminal enterprise doesn’t float your boat, you’ll wonder why you are reading all of that stuff.
   This is meant to be 1,500 words, and I’ve gone over that for obvious reasons. The movie. And the Michael Mann world-view across many movies and television shows. I had to mention those things as a backdrop to a few references in the book.
   The book works for me. It is not about doing thrill-seeker liquor-store hold-ups with a born to lose tattoo on anyone’s forehead. Meg Gardiner gave us a mini-series that would barely be contained as a movie. You might not be into the technological criminal empire that Chris goes for.
   It’s there to beef Chris up as a character who has changed somewhat over time. The build-up to the finale, the shootout, is terrific. I feel there’s a finality to the ending…that isn’t about opening the possibilities of a sequel: HEAT 3. More…setting a mood saying we’re done here, and the protagonists never see each other again. A door is left open, but not much.
   In the end, Meg Gardiner shows that in giving us driven people doing intense things, she is herself a Michael Mann Woman. She’s seen some shit. I’d write more, but this blog’s transponder has been put on a bus to San Clemente. Or possibly Des Moines. So long, reader. You take it easy…you’re home-free.

 

REVISITING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There are two names connected to MOCKINGBIRD. For me, the author is always going to be Nelle. Perhaps mistakenly, whenever I heard mention of her, I had the impression people called her that. It rhymes with bell, and not belly. Her creation is always going to be Scout Finch. Not Jean Louise.
   I write here of Harper Lee out of politeness to Clarity, who is always listening in. Nelle is buried in Monroeville, Alabama. You can take an internet tour of the gravesite, where you’ll see other members of the Lee family there…with Finch in the name.
   Before I revisited Harper Lee’s book, I thought about how I visited it in the first place. Going back, there was the movie. Then I went in search of the book. For those of you who try that sort of thing, do your best to remember the book is the book and the movie is the movie.
   Maybe you encounter those items the other way around. Someone makes a movie, and then it is turned into a book. In that case, do your best to remember the movie is the movie and the book is the book. Or the movie of the book of the T-shirt of the radio show of the hamburger, and so on.
   (That should be the book of the movie of the breakfast cereal. Pardon me.)
   I went looking for the book after seeing the movie adaptation. It’s possible that a documentary prompted me into action. A documentary in which she was referred to as Nelle. As for the film, Harper Lee kept an eye on the movie production long enough to know they weren’t going to mess it up. She did her best not to mess the book up herself. For, first, there was another version of her story. A messed-up execution of one we never needed to see.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book from the start of the 1960s, which is to say there’s a bit of a hangover from the 1950s to deal with in reading it. But the setting is very strictly glued to that of Harper Lee’s childhood in the 1930s. By the time the book ends, historically we’re hovering on the edge of the Dustbowl Years and vivid imagery of the Migrant Mother photographed by Dorothea Lange. W. H. Auden puts a bullet to the 1930s in September 1939, in giving his label to a low dishonest decade…
   But that’s all later. We start around 1933. The outside world, fixed in the grand arena of history, seems so very far away from small-town America and its quota of daily small-town Americanisms depicted in the book. (Although, eventually, Hitler does get a mention.) At its core, MOCKINGBIRD concerns racial injustice sieved through the strained community built around it. This is the only way Lee can approach the story.
   It isn’t.
   There was another version. GO SET A WATCHMAN shows how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD started life. In that earlier manuscript, the character of Scout is grown to adulthood and, as Jean Louise, returns from the big city to view the old home town under a different light. The author is not particularly kind to her people, there. Lee was asked to work on the tale. She transformed a raw idea into a cooked meal by making the story all about Scout’s childhood days.
   Scout is young in both stories. In the rough prototype novel, she’s 26. And in the finished work, she starts the tale at the age of six. The homecoming story of a twenty-something character doesn’t sound as engaging as the tale of the child in the town surrounded by haunting figures.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a ghost story, with plenty of fake ghosts in it. Nothing in the vaguely supernatural background of the book is scary. The scary stuff is left to all those violent adult themes the child struggles to deal with in the foreground. For this is the Deep South in the 1930s; if a black man kisses a white woman, the town’ll hang him as soon as look at him.
   I’ve read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but I refuse to read GO SET A WATCHMAN. Sometimes, publication history is a bitch and stands in the way. I refer to the exploitation of a dead author’s unpublished works as necrophilia.
   “By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist’s work beyond that artist’s lifetime.”
   In this case, the author remained alive when the deal was struck. So this didn’t come across as necrophilia. No bonus points for that. Sharks tasted blood and circled in the water, under a sky packed with vultures biding their time while the hangman sharpened his axe…which he loaded up with buckshot. Or something like that. Unfortunate exploitation of the artist’s work during the artist’s dying days is no less a crime against art.
   Nelle…
   …your honour, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was absolutely of sound body and mind when she gave permission for her prototype manuscript to be published. On the other hand, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was subjected to what can only be described as elder abuse, not even comprehending the rights she granted shortly after her sister’s death and not too long before her own.
   Why mention her sister?
   If you do take an electronic tour of Harper Lee’s grave then you’ll see the name Finch there, just as I said. One of those grave markers notes that Alice Finch Lee was born in 1911 and died in 2014. She’s Nelle’s sister. And, into extreme old age, Alice looked out for Nelle’s interests.
   The chronology runs as follows: Alice dies in 2014, the book comes out in 2015, and Nelle dies in 2016. Alice hadn’t been the guardian of the legacy for the last three years of her life, retiring at the tender age of 100. Nelle’s manuscript existed the whole time, and she never published it. Conspiracy? The weight of time, reputation, and lack of literary output?
   Suppose you do rob a grave. Have the politeness to let the body climb down in there, first.
   You and I were not in the room with the writer and the lawyer, so whether cinder-crusted devilry or tedious publishing talk went on…we’ll never know. It’s much easier to look askance at the publisher for conduct unbecoming. That, we’ll return to.
   I tried as hard as I could. But it is impossible to write of one author without writing of the other. I’ll take a detour into the life and times of Truman Capote, the scamp. Nelle and Truman knew each other as children. He created a tomboyish character based on her in his book, and she created a social oddity of a friend based on him way over in her book.
   Did Truman Capote secretly write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or is that hogwash? I tell ye plain, ’tis hogwash. For the last fucking time, no, Branwell Brontë did not write WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Nelle, with MOCKINGBIRD nesting at the publisher’s, travelled with Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas.
   Multiple murder in Kansas interested Truman, and he wanted to write about that. He decided to visit the scene of the crime: to descend upon it. Despite the jaundiced babbling of Gore Vidal, delivering a scabrous view in the opposite direction, Truman Capote had talent. He didn’t use it wisely or well, but he had something before the booze rented him out and threw him to the bayleaf mob of critics. Baying is hardly the word for poseurs.
   The thought of Truman using Harper Lee as a condom to communicate with the local yokels…yes, that would’ve amused Truman. Capote is Italian slang for condom. I sense he knew. Nelle took Monroeville Alabama and turned it into Maycomb. The book was behind her, but only just. Truman lingered there, as the odd little boy. Now she was in Truman’s company, and he was still at heart an odd little boy. Nelle stood on the ground in another place with comb at the end of the name.
   Holcomb. There she assisted Truman in the early construction of IN COLD BLOOD. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lay far behind Truman. He’d dedicated it to his close friend Jack Dunphy. Years in the making, IN COLD BLOOD would be dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in that order.
   Capote once acknowledged her contribution and then scratched it out. He had trouble acknowledging her help. “Friend.” Yes. What else? “Assistant.” Capote, in hindsight, diminishing Lee’s contribution, knew how to publicise Capote. Nelle was there for the first two months. Did Branwell Brontë write WUTHERING HEIGHTS? No. Did Truman Capote write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? No. Did Nelle Lee write IN COLD BLOOD?
   There, things get tricky. No, she did not write the book. But did she make the writing of the book possible? Did she pave the way? Nelle broke the ice, right? Let’s be fucking clear, here. Nelle Lee dynamited the ice so that Truman Capote could have his book and eat it like cake he’d said he made all by himself. From recipe to reception.
   A new type of book. (It wasn’t.)
   Every word of it true. (A lie.)
   George Washington slept here. (He didn’t. But we might as well throw that one in, too.)
   Truman didn’t care about the multiple murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Since time out of mind, murder most foul has fascinated us. So he knew he could write about a morbidly evergreen subject. That had staying power. Truman didn’t care whether or not the murders would be solved.
   He and Nelle arrived in town in time for the funerals of the murdered family. Truman made a lot of friends there, in Kansas. That’s according to Truman. Nelle made those connections on his behalf. She became the long spoon the community relied upon to sup with Truman Capote.
   You can read his fiction in depth. But you’d never want to be in a room with him for anything beyond the span of a breakfast, Tiffany’s included or otherwise. He’d entertain you, and then you’d be a chapter in a book.
   Gore Vidal? Someone should gore Vidal. Fuck you, Gore Vidal. And for that, you’d have to buy me dinner first. I was childhood friends with Harper Lee. You couldn’t be featured in her book, not even as Boo Radley. But I’m in there. Not as Boo Radley, though. Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal. Go back to assaulting Norman Mailer’s fists with your plastic chin, you… (F-slur redacted.)
   I made that last paragraph up. But for someone writing A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, Truman made things up, too. True account. Not exactly. Multiple Murder. Now that bit he got right. Consequences? From a writer who didn’t care. A writer who came to care about all the wrong things, in the end, concerning that case.
   Nelle: Truman’s cultural guide, secretary, catch-all assistant, note-taker, editor, and friend, making it possible for people to relate to her as the acceptable face of Truman Capote’s investigation.
   Truman continued without Nelle’s assistance for years after, as the case led to suspects, arrests, trial, convictions, and executions. Capote didn’t care about the justice of it. The Clutter family, parents and children, were murdered by two men Capote took more interest in.
   Capote wanted to be the invisible narrator of his big book on big themes in an isolated place. But with Truman it’s all about him, all the time, every single time. That’s why here, I’ve only mentioned the murdered family once by name. I want you to know that the star of the show is Truman Capote…first and foremost, and that’s according to him. Not me. The murdered family is sidelined in favour of contact with the criminals.
   I’ve barely scratched the flawed mirror surface of Truman Capote’s life. It hides an ocean of depth, full of nasty vindictive things. My trident has three points to it. One. Truman knew Nelle in childhood, and served as a model for an oddball character in MOCKINGBIRD. Two. Nelle went with Truman to research the book that would become IN COLD BLOOD. She didn’t have MOCKINGBIRD attached to her name, just then. He was known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three…
   Wait. Detour. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote wrote that and lived off the back of it. (He’d dine out far and wide on all of his books, save at the very end, beyond his death. Stick a pin in that one.) The Breakfast movie appeared a year before the movie adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. Both writers made it big, and made it big at the movies.
   Truman danced with Marilyn Monroe. But she’d not be his character, Holly Golightly. Marilyn was warned off playing a prostitute, and that was that. They should have married, just to give us a disaster-zone as a cautionary tale. But, with Truman, that would be just one more disaster-zone/Tuesday. Let us not dwell on imagined wedlock.
   Capote hated the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the part of Holly. She was too pure, in his mind. No depths of darkness or suffering or want.
   If you know anything of Audrey’s life in the Second World War, you’d know she had more than her share of trouble to help inform playing a character in a movie, thank you very much.
   Capote, at his bitchiest, in resenting someone for not being tough…and simply not knowing or failing to acknowledge what Audrey went through…is about average for the man. Acknowledging others is, for people like Truman, simply a bend in the road that curves round, inevitably, back to people like Truman casting light on themselves.
   Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman was not a fan of the adaptation. He’d bend over backwards to point out that Holly Golightly wasn’t really a call girl. She’s not a prostitute at all. Then he goes and says the thing. Girls like that are American geishas. This comment is deeply offensive to the geisha specifically and to Japan in general. Shocking. That would be like casting Mickey Rooney to play a comedy relief Japanese character in Breakfast at…oh.
   Isn’t Mickey Rooney racist in that movie? TRUMAN: Hold my beer. Let me tell you about Holly Golightly and Japanese culture…
   Truman had issues with his movie adaptation. Nelle had no problems with hers. Truman’s book didn’t win a Pulitzer. Nelle’s did. Book and movie combined to make Nell an unlikely star. She shied from that, quite quickly, leaving her sister Alice to handle the messy business of publicity. Or…lack of publicity.
   There’s no such thing as a reclusive author. But there is such a thing as the author who fucks off into a room with a writing machine to do the work alone. To fill the blank page. That writing machine could be as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a manual typewriter; electronic keyboards are idiot-proof, and, therefore, less fussy.
   Nelle didn’t consider success. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death…at the hands of the reviewers. She was spared that. Truman, for his part, entered into gladiatorial combat with them. Both authors reduced their output. Truman envied Nelle’s success. A pointless envy, as she cared not for it. And so, that friendship ended.
   You’ll find them together as Scout and Dill, in MOCKINGBIRD. Truman Capote, at his most amusing, fictionalised by his childhood friend. And Nelle. If I call her a rebel, that has Southern connotations. Should you hunt for criticism of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it lies in a view that the author looked a little too kindly on her people of the South and let them off the hook. The counter to that is…just plain folks…come across as far more evil in their racism on account of being depicted as just plain folks. To depict their humanity is to reveal their inhumanity.
   Nelle and Truman tasted success. Truman developed an addiction to the fame. Nelle had an allergic reaction to it. Point three of my trident. After big success, MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, that was pretty much the end for both of them. They also faced this problem of a book resurfacing with grim finality. Nelle still had the manuscript of the prototype novel somewhere. Truman thought he’d destroyed his early book.
   The story goes that he left it behind in a place that was taken up by someone else. A magpie of a tenant, who discovered a Truman manuscript, and preserved it. Are some things worth preserving? I was once told a tale that I reworked into the opening of a novel…
   This is the book I shredded. And I destroyed the physical hard drive and all back-up media, too. But I kept the opening. The only good part was the part I’d been told by someone else. This was a singular lesson in learning to write. And in learning how to vapourise anything you didn’t want to see the light of day.
   After their deaths, the two were united by this connection – material resurfacing from the folds of the swamp. Nelle left some short stories in a place in New York. Truman had an early work bob to the surface. Writers were dead and gone, and books still hit the shops. SUMMER CROSSING. You know. Necrophilia.
   In Nelle’s case, THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER collects a bunch of short pieces. Why are there so many “lost” manuscripts to this history? If she’d wanted to, Nelle could have gone back in and worked up a few short stories to keep the literary beggars away. The hungry crowd of critics, I mean. Nelle gave us one book. Be happy in that.
   Scout Finch is a fictionalised version of Nelle. There are books out there with memorable characters. Some of those characters are memorable through description, action, or speech. The truly memorable characters from classic tales are memorable through all three of those things and one more item: they stay with you.
   Knowing how the friendship frazzled – an inevitability, with Truman – I prefer Scout and Dill to remain where they are, staying with memory. Not for me the publishing problem connected to the later-earlier work GO SET A WATCHMAN. Haven’t read it. Won’t read it. Did enough research on it to make comments here, and that’s that.
   It is an earlier work: the prototype. And it is the later work, published in the last days of Nelle’s life. Touted as a sequel, on the basis that it is about Scout returning to town those many years later, it fired enthusiasm in a great crowd to hear of its existence. Except…there are text passages word by revealing word that are practically the same scenes as they are in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Bit of editing, here, there, marking differences in MOCKINGBIRD. Don’t even pretend for a second that this other book is a sequel. It is not.
   Conduct unbecoming of a publisher includes trying to pass this prototype off as the direct sequel. I will grant you we finally discover something the realm of criticism toyed with, as an absent-minded dog toys with a bone. In the prototype book, the heroic Atticus Finch, Scout’s noble lawyer dad, is anything but. He’s a segregationist: the type to build separate drinking fountains based on skin-colour.
   In the prototype, Nelle is not so kind to her people of the South and she doesn’t let them off the hook. The two books could be resolved with expansion and editing of the prototype to turn that work into a true sequel. But this was not to be. Nelle died. She outlived Truman. He’d outlived his friendship with her. Could he have written more, with his heart, brain, and liver shot through like Swiss cheese from the wild excess of too much wild excess? With those wearying disadvantages, writing soon drops off into typing. And sloppy typing, at that.
   Could Nell have written more? She took a stab at true crime, covering a story that sent her into the writing landscape of IN COLD BLOOD. Familiar territory, for she’d walked that road and gathered many notes on the trail once before. But it was not to be, second time around.
   There’s a wanton, libertine, neediness in the literary critic/pundit who cries why couldn’t you give us more than one perfect book, you bastards to all the writers who only have one perfect book in them. Those poseurs are never fucking happy. You can shit gold for literary types like that, and they’d complain the shit wasn’t diamond-encrusted. Be wanting jam on it, next.
   If you enjoy a book, what more is there to say. We could wax lyrical about what might have been. But we can never truly know. Was Nelle thrown from her horse after riding her first book back to the stable of publication? If you write of the complacent daughter returning to the small town only to discover her lawyer father had feet of smashed and tainted clay…
   And the editorial view is…we can’t go with this book…what, then? Be softer in telling your tale. Focus on the childhood character. So you go away for a time and rewrite the damned thing. Now it’s an Instant Timeless Classic™, and you are set for literary life.
   Except. It must rankle that your initial idea, which is not so soft on your people of the South, it must hurt, that the core story was rejected in favour of your classic. What could you do, then? Take the prototype and rework it so that Scout grows up into Jean Louise Finch, and when she heads home from the Big City, obviously, we see she had a young daughter’s infallible view of the noble lawyer…only to realise this idolatry doesn’t match the man’s constant juggling of life in the Deep South…
   You’d need to gut both narratives to make it work. But once the classic is a classic, you can’t go back and change a single word of the sacred text. So the challenge then would be to rework and rework and rework the prototype until it no longer resembles much of anything.
   Some characters never grow up. And they really shouldn’t. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Even Huck Finn. The Secret Garden is set around the year 1907/08, and features a character – the boy Colin – who cannot walk. Spoiler: he regains the ability. And the children in that story never grow up. They mustn’t. For Colin is ten years old and infirm. The moment he walks again, well, that’s the moment he’s fit enough to serve in the trenches of the Great War.
   Holden Caulfield never grows up. People don’t like it when I say…you know he goes back to the school and shoots everyone at the end, right? Anyone forced to read Salinger’s fuck-awful book in school soon reaches that conclusion. So it isn’t in the text, so what?
   Scout and her brother Jem, even oddball Dill, never grow up. Spoiler: Jem never grows up in the prototype book. There’s plenty of forensic analysis online to show you the word-for-word scenes that are the same or nearly. MOCKINGBIRD has a layer of polish to the work. The other, no.
   I have detoured into talk of a monster: Truman Capote. And I am not the first to express distaste for the promotion of a prototype novel as a sequel to itself. No more of that. What brought me here?
   Revisiting Nelle’s tale.
   I’ll have to revisit the film. For that sort of story, seen through a child’s eyes, you always hope, desperately, when sitting down to watch…please tell me they employed children who could ACT. I’ve revisited the book in another way…and I haven’t written of that at all. How remiss.
   Now remember, if you are going to tackle such things, the book is the book and the movie is the movie and never the twain shall meet. But somewhere between 1960 novel and 1962 movie there’s a place for a visual adaptation that moves at your own pace: the pace at which you turn the comic book pages. In 2018, Fred Fordham adapted TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD into a graphic novel.
   Take a digital tour of Monroeville and stop by the old court house. Fred certainly went there, for the trial scenes. I now have two copies of this story. One a novel, and the other a comic book. Both start off with motifs of a fence. By design, if you know the tale. The novel is a towering work. And the hardback comic book does its damnedest to convey the same story.
   For reasons of compression, the movie gives you a taste of the novel if not the full range of flavours. Otherwise the movie would be a decompressed TV show. The same compression gives you a taste of the novel in the graphic novel. Otherwise the comic book would be a whole volume longer.
   I recommend all three adaptations. The movie may stay with you, as might the art in the graphic novel. But the book is the one that goes into the most detail and lingers, positively, the longest. My copy of the book carries an introduction by Albert French, whose own novels are not kind to the oppressor.

 

COLONEL SUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I stared at a story from yesteryear. COLONEL SUN: putting James Bond through his paces after his battle against a man who owned a golden gun. But I also looked at my own short story in that area. I can only call it James Bond Tourism. That’s as kind as I’ll be to my past self. Throw Bond into a familiar setting, drop in references to past misadventures, and wrap it up in a pastry of heat and violence.
   Having had a crack at that sort of nonsense myself, I’m in a position to say that Ian Fleming’s style is easy to observe yet hard to pin down on the page when typing in the manner of that far-off country of the past. The precise detail involving food, drink, places, and vehicles. That ability of Fleming’s to want to write fiction by dressing it in real clothes…is taxing.
   If you desire to invent guns, cars, and meals, why, turn to science fiction and be done with it. Have your hero drive a 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. He should be a detective named Marlowe, in a space zoot suit, with a goldfish bowl for a helmet. Google is his friend. Or digital assistant. Something along those lines.
   Fleming and Chandler wrote about worlds containing real guns. Yes, movies featuring James Bond are full of product placement. This is true of Fleming’s books. He packs the stories with guns, cars, food, and drink. All real. Why invent, when the genuine article adds a layer of reality to an otherwise fanciful tale? Bed the fiction in a garden of real items, and make your outlandish saga somehow more reasonable.
   Writing like Fleming is, indeed, taxing. And that’s for reasons of product placement, alone. James Bond’s taste at breakfast is not Bond’s. Strictly speaking, it isn’t exactly Ian Fleming’s. No. The devil in the detail at breakfast comes from Fleming’s friend William Plomer.
   This set me wondering. Fleming surrounded himself with people who were contacts when it came to story details. Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his book about Commander James Bond? Let’s have a bit of clarity. Novel.
   Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his James Bond novel? For Amis had already tackled Bond to the ground in an ungentlemanly game of rugby elsewhere. Amis drew on Ian Fleming’s books and also Fleming’s knowledge when it came to compiling a dossier on James Bond.
   Not a novel. A book. And he met Fleming, who was near the end of his life, just to cover details in the dossier. Fleming pointed out a few slips. The Bond author was used to those, having taken both barrels from the acid wit of Noël Coward.
…what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England. This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue.
   Fleming had the same brand of acid flowing through his veins, when it came to Noël Coward.
   It’s interesting. When you sweat with embarrassment the sweat runs down your face and drops off your first chin on to your second.
   Amis analysed Bond from the stance of a fannish reader who knew the dossier assignment called for a bit more work than just liking the fiction and regurgitating facts. His own level of criticism may have had Amis shaking in his socks moments before meeting Fleming. But the Bond author didn’t gut the new boy.
   And Amis was the new boy. Soon enough, he, too, would be a Bond author. When Fleming died, leaving The Man with the Golden Gun short of the revision and polish required to bring it up to ramming speed, Amis was offered a crack at it.
   History differs as to what happened next. Amis made recommendations, but they weren’t carried out. Alternatively, Amis made changes uncredited. He rewrote the book. Or he wrote the book. What do we know about any of this wilderness of mirrors?
   Fleming wrote the book. He complained about it to his editor, William Plomer. There were plans to finish the job. But Fleming’s time was marked, and his heart gave out. Amis was asked to look at the manuscript. Money changed hands. He was hired on as a consultant.
   Yes, he made recommendations. Fleming’s fingerprints are all over an actual manuscript. Amis provided a page of notes. You only review twice, Mr Amis. Once when you read the manuscript in private, and once when you publish a bitchy review that questions why some of your own ideas weren’t taken up throughout the story.
   For that is what Amis does in his published review. He asks why Fleming didn’t exploit this point or that part of the plot. Then he offers his own alternative motive for the absurdity of the assassin Scaramanga taking James Bond on as a partner in crime. Scaramanga fancied him something rotten.
   Not according to William Plomer, who’d been closely involved with the book. At the end of his life, Fleming struggled to complete the story. Complete it he did. But not to the level of detail Fleming demanded of himself.
   Amis decried the thinness of the book’s plot. We’ll return to that when I stick a knife in the back of Colonel Sun. And so, to Colonel Sun. It’s easy to mock by calling the book…
   The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim Bond.
   Take a (Bond) Girl Like You.
   The Old (Foreign) Devils.
   Amis has a bit of a fixation with setting Bond up as a hero in the Byronic fashion. Whatever the fuck that is. It’s just Amis being Amis. Or Markham, which was his cover for the Bond assignment. A cover Amis immediately blew.
   Why is Kingsley Amis, of all people, writing a special introduction to this guy Markham’s book? Although Kingsley’s name is shorter on the cover, his name appears in larger type. What’s that about? Some kind of fix was in.
   Ann Fleming, Ian’s widow and keeper of the sacred flame, hated Bond. But she managed to love Ian Fleming, no easy task, and hated Kingsley Amis even more than she detested her husband’s violent creation.
   She didn’t want this slipshod fair-weather commie writing the further adventures of a character she couldn’t stand. Never one to let her snobbishness get in the way of her snobbishness, Ann joined a long list of people who had nothing good to say of Kingsley Amis.
   How did Amis do, in the Bond stakes? Well enough that his work filtered down into the movies. The World is Not Enough borrows the central point of Colonel Sun: M is kidnapped.
   Die Another Day doesn’t have Colonel Sun in it, but there’s a Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. Just far enough from the character Amis gave us to avoid having to pay out cash for the use. However, the movie is a camouflaged version of Moonraker and has little to do with Amis, beyond half-pinching a character name.
   Spectre, though, puts Amis deep in the closing credits for dialogue that appears in Colonel Sun. This is a torture scene. Congratulations. Amis made it into the worst Bond movie. Spectre is, in my view, fucking lamentable. That’s a highly technical term. Film has its moments, but moments don’t lead to a satisfying cinema-going experience.
   They’d done a deal. Spectre was back on the menu, after the legal dust settled – for the last time. Kevin McClory’s long-running dispute over ownership of various story elements died with him. After that, it was much easier to settle on a deal.
   Okay. Resurrect Spectre. And the boss, Blofeld. But make it meaningful. How? Oh, show flashbacks to other Bond characters in the opening credits. That’s where the welding starts. Taking the Daniel Craig movies and fusing them into one long integrated storyline that shows…Spectre was behind everything, all along.
   No. It does not work. Thanks for asking. The movie is the story of two boys who know each other. One grows up to be James Bond. And the other…what, creates Spectre just to get back at Bond? Er…
   Where the fuck was I? Amis successfully wrote and delivered his one Bond novel. The opening is good. There are vivid scenes. His one failing is the plot, which is practically non-existent. Think it over for two seconds, and it falls apart. Why is the villain doing this? For all his talk of trying something new, by going into a Greek setting, Amis rehashes Doctor No as a far less interesting Colonel Sun.
   A fleet of books followed, guided by other hands. Had Amis lived to see his credit in Spectre, well, first, he’d have been a hell of a fucking age. Second, he’d have derided much of the movie. You can see his ears perking up at the dialogue in the torture sequence. Numbers flash over his eyes as he calculates whether any payment for usage felt worthwhile.
   Amis wrote Bond for the money. Fleming wrote Bond to create excitement as he typed page to page, staving off boredom. Ian Fleming, thrilled at the thought of creating a scene in a story. That stays with me, long after Amis typing for cash saw his Colonel disappear at the first sunset.