“We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” – Hugh Hefner, in an editorial in the first issue of Playboy
Michael Chabon’s new novel.
Michael Chabon is an author I feel a personal connection with.
I bought Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his first novel, when it was published in trade paperback in 1988 or ’89. I loved the book (and the female love interest, the delightfully named Phlox) and was also supremely envious (Chabon was 25 at the time, I was just a couple of years younger and “novelist” was very much a career choice I had in mind). When The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was published in 2000, I sold the idea of an interview with Chabon to the Globe & Mail newspaper, even though this meant driving down to Seattle (where he was giving a reading at Elliott Bay Book Company).
After the reading we did the interview, and Chabon was gracious, even when we kept pestering him for a photo and he was running late for dinner. Of course, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, an achievement I’d like to think I had a hand in although of course I did not.
In the last decade, Chabon has emerged as a champion of genre fiction and comic books. He’s written essays about Sherlock Holmes and American Flagg! His short novel The Final Solution featured Sherlock Holmes (though I don’t think he’s explicitly named); The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a mystery set in an alternate world, where the Jews, post-WWII, have settled in Alaska (they are “the frozen chosen”). He’s also written comic books, including a series about The Escapist, the fictional superhero invented for Kavalier & Clay.
Having grown up on comic books, science fiction paperbacks and John D. MacDonald thrillers myself, before discovering John Updike, Philip Roth and other so-called realists, I have come to admire Chabon even more for helping wake me up to the realization that there’s no shame in loving both Rabbit is Rich and The Quick Red Fox.
His latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, is set in the real world, more or less, although there is an alternate history, sort of (Chabon creates a fake ’70s blaxploitation film series). And there are tons of pop culture references, from Star Trek to Marvel Comics to Quentin Tarantino. And two of the main characters own and operate a record store, so there’s lots of music, mostly jazz, references. (Oh, and there’s even a Barack Obama cameo, which is quite well done.)
I enjoyed Telegraph Avenue, though I’m not sure I found it rave-worthy (it’s not the book I would recommend to someone who hadn’t read anything else by its author). It’s kind of like High Fidelity but with jazz instead of indie-rock and more midwifery. Lots more.
Anyway, this past Wednesday I got to interview Chabon again. This time the chat was via phone (Chabon was at his office in Oakland) for a piece that will run in the Vancouver weekly the Georgia Straight next week (he’s on a book tour that brings him to St. Andrews-Wesley United Church Sept 26). Parts of the interview didn’t make it into the finished piece, especially some small talk at the beginning of the conversation about genre fiction and obscure writers we admire, including Walter Tevis and Nicholas Meyer. I’ll post another excerpt or two in the next week or so.
Michael Chabon on Walter Tevis and Nicholas Meyer:
SC: In an interview with Mother Jones recently, you mentioned Nicholas Meyer. He had an interesting career – the wrote a Sherlock Holmes novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and wrote and directed The Wrath of Khan, the second Star Trek movie.
Michael Chabon: That’s right, one of my favourites of all the Star Trek feature films. He was a big important figure for me. That first book of his, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was a little light bulb over my head. It was the first piece of fan fiction I encountered, and in many ways I think it’s the supreme fan fiction, with pastiches that really do work and give you the feeling of reading something by Arthur Conan Doyle. And Wrath of Khan, when his name turned up on the credits I remembered how thrilled I was.
SC: And didn’t he make that time travel movie, Time After Time [1979]?
Michael Chabon: The one with Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, Jack the Ripper and H.G. Wells chasing each other… I love that movie.
Time After Time (1979), written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, features H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper in modern-day San Francisco. Meyer would later go on to write and direct the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan.
I mentioned him at some point a long time ago, around the time when Kavalier & Clay was published. He got wind of it and sent me a note. And then he died shortly after.
SC: Are you a fan of Walter Tevis?
Michael Chabon: He’s a favourite of mine. I love Mockingbird, and of course the chess book, The Queen’s Gambit. I’ve reread it three times since the first time. I’ve turned my wife [Ayelet Waldman] onto it too, it’s one of her favourite books. He was such an odd writer, his writing career had such an odd trajectory. The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth—and one of the greatest chess novels ever written.
If you see this book, buy it. Read it. Love it. Treasure it. Then keep buying copies to give to friends.
Purity Ring at Electric Owl, Vancouver Sept 7 2011. Robyn Hanson photo
Invariably, every Sunday I scan the New York Times, alert for Canadian content, especially in the Arts & Leisure section.
In today’s paper (Sunday July 22) I was rewarded with not one but two finds. The first was pleasant - a q-and-a with Megan James and Corrin Roddick of the band Purity Ring. This was gratifying partly because I saw the duo perform last fall with YACHT here in Vancouver, and also because we have a set of photos from that show on my own “arts & leisure” site, The Snipe News.
The other horn of this Canadian content is a feature story on CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi. I won’t go into this piece anymore than to quote the author of the piece, John Schwartz, who writes that Ghomeshi’s former band Moxy Fruvous “specialized in wordy, witty and often political songs…”
I’m afraid I have to take exception to the word “witty.” From the group’s name to this song and video, I think witty is the last word I’d use.
Video – Moxy Fruvous, “Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors”:
Spice Girls diorama at the Fall Gallery Vancouver July 7 2012.
Before the Dukes of September show last night (read my review here) with the fogies at the Orpheum we stopped in at the Fall Tattoo and Art Gallery to see what the kids are up to these days.
Turns out they’re into their own form of nostalgia – remembering/celebrating the ’90s by way of the Spice Girls.
Vancouver nurse/gallery curator Christina Chant put on the show, a follow-up to Bill You Murray Me, another celebrity-inspired gallery from earlier this year. The idea is to come up with some Spice Girls-inspired art; everyone, no matter what their degree of talent, is invited to submit.
As with the previous show, Zig-a-Zigallery offered an embarrassment of creative riches. These pics, as bad as they are, don’t do justice to the variety and imagination on display, but they give some indication of the art. Not pictured: a two-page comic strip; Spice Girls envisioned as Futurama-ish disembodied heads; and the drag version of the singers, who were to make an appearance later on in the evening.
Spice Girls via Picasso at the Fall Gallery Vancouver July 7 2012.
Caught this in Sunday’s New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section:
How old are these reporters, 12? They’ve never heard of funnyman Rich Little (who was born in Ottawa, btw. Yay Canada!)?
Celebrity impressionist Rich Little.
Despite – or maybe because – it was never resolved properly, Twin Peaks reverberates in the pop culture consciousness like few other series of recent decades. I recall watching the show weekly but I’ve never seen Fire Walk With Me (the movie prequel?), and I’ve never really felt the urge to revisit the series – maybe because of its lack of proper resolution.
But I’d consider myself a Lynch fan – I love Mulholland Drive (here’s Lynch discussing, but not really, the meaning behind the movie courtesy the blog Biblioklept) and parts of Lost Highway. And although Inland Empire (2006) was more of a chore to sit through than a pleasure, it did have some worthwhile, supremely Lynchian moments. I do recall seeing Eraserhead when I was 17, and then buying U2′s War right after. No correlation.
I haven’t heard Lynch’s album, Crazy Clown Time.
Here’s a link to a story on my site about a new Twin Peaks zine. It’s cool to see a younger generation (I’m guessing the people putting it together missed the series the first time around, in 1990-1) discovering the series.
Peter Dinklage, Jason Momoa and Emilia Clarke on the Game of Thrones panel, San Diego Comic-Con July 21 2011.
On Thursday, July 21, the first official day of the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con, one of the highlights of the 4,000-capacity Ballroom 20 was the panel for Game of Thrones. A critical and popular hit on HBO, the series is based on a bunch of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, and the ballroom was packed with people wanting to know what is in store for Season Two.
Exec producer David Benioff said if they could get to the point in the third novel, A Storm of Swords, and an event he referred to as the “R.W.” (which I have since discovered stands for the “Red Wedding”, I think) he’d be happy.
Other revelations; actor Peter Dinklage looked like he did not want to be there; Jason Momoa, who plays the barbarian king Khal Drogo, made a joke about getting to (in character) “rape beautiful women”; actress Emilia Clarke effused about her character Danaerys’ arc from meek chattel to dragon queen; and there won’t be any deleted scenes on the DVD (most of what they shot went into the series).
More interesting, perhaps, was what happened later in the evening. Through a fluke far too boring to get into, I found myself on the second floor of the Hard Rock Hotel, in a room where HBO was throwing a small, intimate party with buffet-style food for the Game of Thrones cast and crew.
The first sight I saw was actress Piper Perabo of Covert Affairs (and, more importantly, the 2000 movie Coyote Ugly), posing for a photo with Game of Thrones actress Lena Headey. They were on their way out, though, and when their glitter-dust faded I took stock of the room.
There was Momoa, who also plays Conan in this summer’s Conan the Barbarian; Benioff; author George R.R. Martin; and Emilia Clarke, as well as a bunch of others who must have been HBO execs.
When you’re thrust into a situation like this, or at least when I am, my first instinct is to clam up, which is what I did.
I couldn’t very well do what I wanted to do, i.e. talk to the stars (and Martin), because people would immediately twig onto the fact that I shouldn’t be in there. Besides, there was a host bar and a bartender willing to pour me Grey Goose martinis, so I retreated to a corner with my drink and pretended to be interested in my phone while watching what was going on around me.
Martin, round and white-bearded, was holding court at one table. The lovely Clarke smiled and laughed at another, less populated table. Momoa had removed his jacket to reveal his arms and was showing the bartenders how to pop off beer bottle caps with another beer bottle.
At one point one of his friends, a guy I’ll call Darryl, wondered over. I made up some bullshit story of who I was with and he didn’t seem to question it. We chatted about how he is basically paid to hang out with Momoa and keep an eye on him, and that Momoa was recently filming (I think Darryl said in Mexico) with Chris Evans, star of the current superhero blockbuster Captain America, and whom at least some people on set referred to as “Captain Arrogant”.
I asked about Conan the Barbarian, and Darryl said it was going to be “huge for Jason”, but that it’s only a so-so movie, that the producers kept pushing for more corn because they were scared of losing their investment.
He wandered off and I decided to help myself to a little food from the buffet table. I took my plate and sat down at a table, risking more conversation. Momoa came over to get his jacket from a nearby chair. “Hey,” I said. “Can you show me how to open beer bottles the way you were doing just now?” (Jesus, could I be any more obsequious?)
“No,” he said, grabbing his jacket from the chair behind me. The jacket struck me in the head on its ascension in his big meaty grip. “Only Kahl Drogo can open beers that way!” And with that he left.
I did too, soon after, to crash another party.
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988).
I read The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley in its Vintage Contemporaries edition, probably about the time it was published, in 1988.
The Last Good Kiss is a detective novel, more or less, and though I don’t remember much of it I do recall loving the fabulous poem that serves as its epigraph (and from where the book’s title comes), “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” by Richard Hugo:
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs–
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
I know nothing about Hugo, but while digging up the book cover image I came across a blog post that mentions the book and also the illustration, by Rick Lovell:
Last Good Kiss illustration by Rick Lovell.
Kudos to Vintage Contemporaries, who also first published David Foster Wallace‘s Broom of the System, and also published Richard Ford‘s The Sportswriter and Charles Portis‘ Norwood, among many others.
You can read more about Vintage Contemporaries on this blog post, “Vintage Contemporaries”.
Nicole Kidman in To Die For (1995).
- by Adrian Mack
The truth is you can’t throw a rock in Hollywood without hitting either a Sc*****logist or somebody from a similarly weird and frightening cult. It just so happens that in Van Sant’s circle of players, you don’t need a particularly strong throwing arm.
My Own Private Idaho star River Phoenix was raised inside the Children of God cult (which has since rebranded itself the Family International, or TFI), and died not too long after famously telling Details magazine that he lost his virginity at the age of four. Which isn’t surprising as the Children of God encouraged sex with minors and produced child pornography.
As tends to be the case with pseudo-religious sects involved in pedophilia and human trafficking—see the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church for another example – the Children of God had far-reaching political influence and protection, up until shit got a little out of control for everyone.
And making its regular cameo somewhere in the background of the tale is a certain auspicious American dynasty with ties from everything to the Third Reich, to the Kennedy assassination, to the introduction of crack into the American bloodstream, and the financing of international terrorism - whose current patriarch is joined at the hip with the CIA.
Alex Constantine writes, “In the United States the political pull of the sect extended to the Bush administration. A chorale of Family children kicked off a Christmas show in 1992 for Barbara Bush in the East Room of the White House, for which they received certificates of appreciation signed by President Bush.”
Van Sant would eventually cast River’s apparently troubled brother Joaquin beside Sc*****logist Nicole Kidman in To Die For, a film that supplied both with important career breaks. Van Sant’s bizarre remake of Psycho, meanwhile, starred Anne Heche, who would reveal two years later that she had a second personality called Celestia – who was not only an extra-terrestrial but also the half-sister of Jesus Christ.
In her autobiography Call Me Crazy, Heche focuses on the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, a Baptist minister, although her own particular brand of crazy is depressingly familiar once you’re acquainted with the background to UFO cults, and their inevitable mish-mash of new and conventional religion, sexual abuse, and apocalyptic prophecy.
In his groundbreaking 1979 book Messengers of Deception, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee proposes that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it is in reality, was seized and exploited by covert agencies as a means to develop and test “control systems” – or “religion”, to give it a more familiar name.
Over a decade later, in his book Revelations, Vallee hits pay dirt when an investigation into the Franck Fontaine abduction leads to “tangible organizations and to beings of flesh and blood within the French military and technological establishment.”
There, a “Mr. D” from the French Ministry of Defense goes on the record to reveal that the entire Fontaine abduction and subsequent failed efforts to develop a religious cult was “an Exercise of General Synthesis” – aka a large-sale covert government mind control op. Mr. D further reveals that only 10 to 15 were in the know, “all at a high enough level to establish what sort of manipulation was justified under the state secrets rule.”
Asked if the experiment had “wider objectives”, Mr. D replies ominously, “If this operation had been completed, the next phase would have been far worse.”
Which brings us all back to the looming presence of MKULTRA and its unofficial refuge in doomsday cults, millennialist religious movements, and – ahem – the world’s greatest mind control device, Scientollywood.
Mr. Vallee is an extraordinarily sincere investigator who is viewed as something of a heretic in the UFO community for his audacious habit of letting his research determine his conclusions, and not the other way around. He has little patience for what’s known as the “Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis” or the nuts-and-bolts spacecraft we’re persistently told ET arrives in, although Steven Spielberg went ahead and characterized him that way anyway, in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Francois Truffaut’s earnest UFO hunter Lacombe was based on Vallee, although they share very little outside of nationality. Spielberg meanwhile has done more to hypnotize the average person into a hopeless condition of “I want to believe” stupefaction than any shadowy intelligence group, assuming there’s a difference.
Apropos of nothing and everything, here’s a crazy video clip from 1978 of Spielberg telling Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger that he swallowed a transistor when he was a kid. It was given to him by his father, he explains, who announced, “Son, this is the future.”
Spielberg also tells them about the voices in his head and proclaims, “Everybody’s home should have TV…” Steven Spielberg’s father was a computer engineer who held 15 patents and whose employment history included stints at both IBM and GE.
But moving along – there are, of course, those inexplicable tragedies that just seem to happen in American every once in awhile. Like the Columbine massacre, which provided Gus Van Sant with the material for one of his most resonant movies, Elephant. As per the well-known tale of killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Elephant follows the activities of two misfits and a killing spree prompted by poor parenting, bullying, and – shades of Milk - closeted homosexuality.
As ever, Van Sant appears to mount an entirely anti-mainstream exercise that simultaneously lacks any depth or spirit of inquiry, especially if you’re inclined to wonder why so much about the events of April 20, 1999 remain unresolved, contradictory, or sealed from public scrutiny.
That will have to wait until next week, but for now, it’s worth pondering what it took to smuggle 95 explosive devices including two propane tanks into Columbine High, as the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office stated in its official report. Elephant, of course, makes no attempt to explain how two kids managed to do that.
Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in the Gus Van Sant movie Milk.
- by Adrian Mack
Members of the Acadamy watched Milk and saw an Oscar-winning performance by Sean Penn. A small handful of others watched Milk and saw a rabbithole that led all the way to Jonestown, covert mind control experiments, pedophile cults, mysteriously dead rock stars, mysteriously still-living rock stars, the lingering questions behind Columbine, and the ever blessed Church of S*****ology.
Confused? You will be! An aspect of the Harvey Milk story conspicuously missing from Gus Van Sant’s fine movie is the murdered city supervisor’s relationship with the People’s Temple. Led by Jim Jones, 913 members of the People’s Temple allegedly committed suicide en masse in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978.
Nine days later, Milk and San Francisco Mayer George Moscone were killed by former city supervisor Dan White.
Jones and his ostensibly liberal People’s Temple had political clout in San Francisco in the mid-’70s, and were courted by both Moscone and Milk – which is hardly surprising, since the Temple explicitly offered a haven to the area’s oppressed minorities.
Jones was eventually appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority by Moscone. By 1977, however, with scrutiny growing over reports of abuse and other unsavoury activities, Jones and his Temple fled to Guyana. Moscone and Milk continued to publicly defend the People’s Temple, right up until Congressman Leo Ryan took his fact-finding party to Guyana and was assassinated for his efforts.
In his essay “The Black Hole of Guyana” , political researcher John Judge writes, “The story of Jonestown is that of a gruesome experiment, not a religious utopian society.” Despite a well-maintained effort in mainstream channels to burnish the official story of a charismatic psycho persuading some 900 people to commit suicide, all evidence points to an even stranger story, and a subsequent cover-up.
According to Judge and other researchers like Alex Constantine, Jonestown was likely a platform for the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program, or something very similar. Predictably, the Temple’s background is replete with high-level Military and Intelligence benefactors. As was the custom, the threat of federal oversight or discovery prompted the experiment to self-immolate.
Under the prevailing official version, there is no reasonable explanation for the findings of the Guyanese Grand Jury which claimed there were a mere three suicides among the initial 408 dead (most had been forcibly injected, shot, or strangled, according to Guyanese forensic pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo).
With the arrival of Green Berets and the assistance of British Black Watch troops, the death-count rose to 913 over the next week. Press reports were fuzzy. The operation was “botched” - when the bodies were shipped to the States, exposure and heat had made forensic autopsy impossible. Jones’ remains were never properly identified. Some researchers contend that Jones – whose gun was found some 200 feet from his body – couldn’t have pulled the trigger on himself. Some argue that the body wasn’t even his.
Tales of a so-called Temple hit squad circulated soon after the massacre, triggering speculation about the timing of the deaths of Milk and Moscone. The killer, Dan White, demonstrated the “earmarks of mind control” (Constantine). The Vietnam vet, and former cop – elected as a Democrat – “spoke as if he was ‘programmed,’” according to Stan Smith, a local labor leader. During Board sessions, White was known to slip into lapses of silence punctuated by goose-stepping walks around the chambers.
Here then is the background to Harvey Milk’s political career and assassination, which has been airbrushed out of the movie Milk. Which is fine – Van Sant and Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black aren’t required to show a scintilla of interest in the distractions of Jonestown, especially in a text designed to honour Harvey Milk’s important and ground-breaking political achievements.
But it isn’t the first time Van Sant has slyly taken what one might call the Establishment view on topics that otherwise crackle with para-political, hidden, or radioactive implications.
In both Last Days and Elephant, the filmmaker reduces the suicide of Kurt Cobain and the Columbine massacre to nebulous and artsily-mounted psychological mysteries – much like the inference in Milk that the “goose-stepping” White is blighted by his closeted homosexuality. The implicit message – in Last Days and Elephant particularly – is that we can’t understand what motivates people to such extreme acts; that they’re unknowable.
But once again, both films avoid inquiry into back-stories that invoke the horrific spectre of MKULTRA, military black-ops, and the curious relationships between various cults and the Intelligence community. As do the Van Sant films To Die For, My Own Private Idaho, and his weird role as “consultant” on a forthcoming movie about… well, we’ll get to that. Let’s start more or less at the beginning, with a look at the death of River Phoenix, and the late actor’s ties to something called the Children of God.
Buckle up!
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