Tag Archives: urban life

The Glass Top-Hat

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NYPD, cops

(photo: Nick Gulotta, Creative Commons license)

Loved this Alexandra Alter article about crime novelist Richard Price and his adoption of a pseudonym, in the hope of producing a quickie novel (and not suffer years over it!). Why not use his skills to dash off a plot-heavy, (shudder) “commercial” novel and reap the proceeds? In fact, he found out he is who he is, and the new book took just as much time and care as ever.

Price, interviewed this week on the PBS New Hour, is the author of the well-crafted and popular novels Freedomland, Lush Life, and Clockers. This pseudonymous endeavor has now emerged as his ninth novel, The Whites, which The New Yorker review by Joyce Carol Oates describes as “a maze of a novel” about a case that haunts NYPD detective Billy Graves. (The ghosts of unsolved cases are a universal occupational hazard for cops, as Price described it for PBS.) The book’s awkward parentage is displayed on the cover as “Richard Price Writing as Harry Brandt.” Even though The Whites came out only about two weeks ago, it’s already a hardcover fiction best-sellers (#5 on the NYT list in it first week).

“You realize you only know one way to write,” Price said during his New York Times interview. In keeping with his stripped-down approach, he did no new research, but instead called upon his extensive experience in ride-alongs with police and their lengthy conversations for his previous novels, as well as in his writing for HBO’s The Wire.

The whole pseudonym exercise was a failure, Price now says. “It seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and now I wish I hadn’t done it.” And, in a line for the ages: “This pen name is like pulling a rabbit out of a glass hat.”

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A Coffee in Berlin

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coffee, creativity

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

The title of this award-winning 2014 German film (trailer) is a tease, since the protagonist spends the day the movie describes trying—and failing—to score a cup of joe. Would he had gotten it, and he might have been better prepared for his frustrating encounters with girlfriends, his dad, the creator of an unintentionally hilarious performance art piece, and some drunken toughs, among others. He doesn’t want any of these interactions to go the way they do, but he is “a victim of inertia,” says Washington Post reviewer Stephanie Merry, a young man who, so far, has chucked his opportunities into an ocean of cool.

Jan Ole Gerster’s debut film, starring Tom Schilling as Niko (originally titled Oh, Boy), has created a likeable if drifting protagonist and given him situations punctuated with sometimes absurd humor. You want Niko to pull himself together and for the sparks of empathy we see to flame into action. One of those flames occurs near the end of the film, when he hears a rambling, drunken tale about people who really had it bad. Great musical score by Cherilyn MacNeil and The Major Minors.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating is 72%–considerably lower than other reviewers give it (or I would)–with 75% of audiences liking it.

*** Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran FoerExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell

By Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Jeff Woodman, Barbara Caruso, and Richard Ferrone – Many people are already familiar with this 2005 book, because of its popularity (despite mixed reviews) and the Tom Hanks movie made from it, and  know the basic plot: nine-year-old Oskar Schell, bereft after the death of his father in the World Trade Center, finds a mysterious key among his father’s possessions and embarks on a one-boy quest to find what the key will unlock. His only clue is the word “Black” on the envelope the key was inside.

Oskar is precocious—an inventor, a scientist, a tambourine-player, a Francophile—and knows so much about so much that the holes in his knowledge gape unfathomably. He’s also full of tics and fears and will pinch himself to make a bruise when something upsets him. Overall, he is an engaging and often funny narrator, getting a bit tiresome only from time to time (this review is of the audio version, so I cannot comment on the circled words, photos, fingerprints, and other marginalia featured in the print version).

Any book about a quest is about what the seeker learns along the way, and Oskar’s brief encounters with the multitudinous New Yorkers surnamed “Black” are well-imagined (especially 103-year-old Mr. A. Black who accompanies him on some of his searches). From them, eventually, he comes to terms with his guilt and grief. Yet the most important understanding he acquires, he finds at home, when he comes to understand there are many ways to respond to the loss of someone you love and not one “right” way.

Parts of the book are told from the point of view of Oskar’s grandmother and his grandfather, his father’s parents. For me, these lengthy flashbacks, told in the form of letters about their past, World War II Dresden, and their difficult relationship with each other, were not as interesting as the present-day story.

Foer has obvious affection for this character, his voice, and his quest to find out how his father really died after the “extremely loud and incredibly close”—and just how loud and how close we don’t find out until near the book’s end—tragedy of 9/11. I cannot help but wonder whether this affinity is related to his own experience, which Foer did not write about until 2010. When he was eight, a summer camp sparkler-making project went awry, and the explosion injured him badly and nearly killed his best friend. Part of that traumatized boy may have become Oskar.

****Dead I Well May Be

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Mexico, alley

(photo: Eneas De Troya, Creative Commons license)

By Adrian McKinty, read by Gerard Doyle. You’ll recognize the title of this 2003 crime novel as a line in that quintessential Irish song, “Danny Boy,” but nothing about this book is cliché. Last year I read and enjoyed my first McKinty, In the Cold, Cold Ground, and this one is equally engaging. Both books were the first in a series, and I’ll hope to read the full sets.

Protagonist Michael Forsythe is very much a bad boy who reluctantly leaves Ireland to settle in New York City during the violent, drug-ridden 1980s. There he joins a gang of Irish thugs and makes the unpardonable error of bedding the gang-leader’s girlfriend. But he’s not merely a violent man, he’s an intelligent and erudite charmer, too, with hilarious and spot-on observations about American life and his fellow criminals. To say that things don’t go well for him here in the U.S. of A. is an understatement, but Michael can think rings around his confederates and he skillfully manipulates and dodges the politics of violence between Irish and Dominican gangs. Only once does he let his guard down and travels to a chancy Mexican rendezvous with his pals, and . . .

McKinty establishes a lively pace and an engaging narrator, who kept my sympathies, even when he does one of those things I really wish he hadn’t. Narrator Gerard Doyle is a genius.

“Where the West (Still) Begins”

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Lest you think Fort Worth has nothing more to offer than cowboy culture and steak, here’s the lowdown on its Culture, Characters, and Community!

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington, Amon Carter Museum

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington (wikimedia.org)

Culture

Fort Worth’s Cultural District includes three art museums notable for their architecture as well as their art. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, designed by Philip Johnson, was founded to display Carter’s collection of pieces by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

Boatmen on the MIssouri, George Caleb Bingham

Boatmen on the Missouri, G. C. Bingham (wikimedia)

It now houses more than 200,000 objects, many of which are classics. They run the gamut of American artists and include a newly acquired full-length portrait of actor Edwin Booth by John Singer Sargent. A special exhibit on the work of George Caleb Bingham (through 1/18/15), documenting 1800s life on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers uses modern Xray techniques to discover how these iconic paintings were assembled.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Louis I. Kahn

Kimbell Art Museum (wikimedia)

The adjacent Kimbell Art Museum comprises two buildings—one with beautifully vaulted spaces designed by Louis I. Kahn, which opened in 1972, and the other a Renzo Piano-designed pavilion used for special exhibitions. Currently on view in the latter is a popular showing of Impressionist portraits. There simply wasn’t time to visit the visually striking Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth or much of the Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Bass Performance Hall, Fort WorthThe downtown has preserved some of its rich architecture, including an impressive collection of Art Deco buildings. Helpful plaques explain many of these buildings’ history and interesting design elements. However, the three-dimensional exterior of downtown’s  Bass Performance Hall has to be the most jaw-dropping, with the angels’ trumpets extending waaaaay out into the street.

 

Characters

Two daytrips took us away from Fort Worth. In one, my cousin and I revisited the tiny town of Loving, Texas, where our great-grandparents settled in 1906, and a classic “wide spot in the road.” There’s little left but the cemetery, although the town claims a population of about 300. Loving is named for the family of Oliver Loving, who with Charles Goodnight developed the Goodnight-Loving Trail, used to drive cattle from Texas to New Mexico for the Army and on to Denver. Oliver Loving was wounded in a Comanche attack on one of these expeditions and died at Fort Sumner in New Mexico.He extracted a promise from Goodnight to bury him in Texas, and this episode was one inspiration for Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove.

Sam Rayburn museum and library, Bonham, Texas

Sam Rayburn museum and library

Our second sidetrip, through some beautiful north Texas countryside, was to Bonham, Texas, and the library, home, and burial site of Sam Rayburn. Rayburn, from an American political era that now seems almost unimaginably collegial, served 48 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was Speaker for 17 years. Brochure: “Rayburn’s fairness and mastery of the political process earned him respect from both sides of the House floor.”

And, another reason to go to Bonham that shouldn’t be discounted is the opportunity to have lunch at the Hickory Bar-B-Que on Sam Rayburn Drive!

President and Mrs. Kennedy spent the night of November 21, 1963, in the Presidential suite of our Fort Worth hotel (which our room’s windows looked out on). It was raining on the morning of the 22nd, but the President saw a crowd gathering, and went downstairs to greet people. Seeing them standing there in the wet, he said, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth.” Those words are inscribed on a memorial to Kennedy adjacent to the hotel, and the hotel itself contains numerous photographs from that visit. He and Mrs. Kennedy attended a breakfast at the Chamber of Commerce before leaving on the disastrous trip to Dallas.

2014-11-27 08.51.09

 

Community

Fort Worth - Loving 11-2014 024Philip Johnson designed a spectacular water garden in the old Hell’s Half Acre district, behind the Fort Worth Convention Center, a surprising urban feature that includes a quiet pool, cataracts of water (photo), and a sure-fire winner for any “most delightful use of fountains” award. The Japanese Garden at the Botanic Gardens is another urban getaway, with elegant vistas at every turn.

Fort Worth - Loving 11-2014 045

Even the best laid trip plans sometimes confront the unexpected, and so we learned that Fort Worth’s annual holiday “parade of lights” would pass the back of our hotel on the day set aside for museum visits. This meant we had to return to the hotel early before the streets were closed. We watched the parade for more than an hour and over a hundred entries before requiring nourishment. It was amazing that there were any Fort Worth residents left to crowd the street as onlookers, there were so many people in the parade—on horses, in cars (antique and sports), on floats, in bands, in informal marching groups of indeterminate origin, in Shriner assemblages, on fire trucks, you name it. But the most hilarious entry was the one that led the parade: the black-pompadoured “World Famous Wheelie-ing Elvi.” Good Rocking Tonight!

(photo: twfwe)

(photo: twfwe)

Michael Connelly and Life Change

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Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln LawyerA big fan of Michael Connelly—and his fictional crew, Harry Bosch and “Lincoln Lawyer” Mickey Haller—I was eager to study his selection of “ Books that Changed My Life” on Audible.com. Connelly is one of more than 50 authors from whom Audible has gathered this information—everyone from Philippa Gregory to James Patterson to another of my favorites, Alan Furst. The authors were asked to name the smallish number of books, generally two to four, that fit the life-changing rubric.

Connelly’s picks are Neely Tucker’s first novel, The Ways of the Dead, because of the way that, despite the fast-moving Washington D.C.-based story, Tucker “always takes the time for wry observation of the humanity of the streets.” Washington Post review here. He also singled out Alafair Burke’s All Day and a Night (New York Journal of Books review here). For both of these choices, one of Connelly’s main criteria was how well the authors conveyed a sense of their cities, for example, saying Tucker “knows the turf inside and out.” Much like Bosch and Haller know Los Angeles, I’d say.

His third selection is Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead (NPR review here)—“full of surprises,” Connelly says. The funny thing about these three choices is that they were all published last June. Either Connelly has an attention span similar to mine, or June was a epochal month for him. At least, he seems to have a different definition of “life-changing” than Audible’s mavens intended.

As it happens, Koryta is another author asked for life-changers, and his picks are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“rhythm and word choice”), King’s The Shining (“a clinic in suspense”), and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, with its “peerless prose,” which in the audio version is narrated by Brad Pitt. The three novels are All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing (my *****review), and Cities of the Plains.

As a postscript, I note the perennial difficulty of finding a review of the one book written by a woman, an issue that helped launch a great organization, Sisters in Crime.

Vancouver Cool

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Vancouver, Marine building, Superman doorway

(photo: author)

Five days in Vancouver for a wedding last week. What a great city! Outdoor art, cathedral-forested Stanley Park, great food (order the salmon!), friendly people, and water views everywhere. Especially enjoyed the Aquarium (for a smile, see the sea otter cam here—I wanted to show you the jelly fish cam, because they were so spectacular, but I’m not sure it’s working; you can try), a walking tour of the city’s scattered Art Deco buildings (Vancouver is a city where the Developer is King), reminders of the 2012 winter Olympics, and being on the water. Great to leave a place with “more to see” and reasons to return. You may recognize the “Gotham” doorway at right from numerous movies!

orca, Blackfish, outdoor art, VancouverThe Aquarium is caught up in the anti-cetacean captivity controversy, touched on in this recent New Yorker article about challenges in aquarium design. The Vancouver Aquarium’s position is explained in this open letter. They are non-profit and do not keep orcas, problems about which were stunningly revealed in the documentary, Blackfish.

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O, Canada! A Week in Ottawa

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O, Canada!

Ottawa, in 1857 picked by Queen Victoria to be the capital of the province of Canada, has grown into a beautiful, walkable city. In a week there, it wasn’t possible to see all it has to offer—at least not at the leisurely pace befitting a vacation. Early June was an idea time for a visit, too, perfect weather for long walks along the Ottawa River and Rideau Canal, and not yet overrun with tourists. (That can’t be said for mid-May, when the area hosts the world’s largest tulip festival—a gift in perpetuity to Canada for sheltering the Dutch Royal Family during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.)

Parliament buildings, Ottawa

Parliament buildings, Ottawa (photo: author)

The main government buildings—Parliament and the Supreme Court—are spectacular gothic revival style, reportedly modeled on the picturesque nearby hotel, the Fairmont Chateau Laurier. The hotel’s opening was delayed some months because the developer, bringing furniture from England, died aboard the Titanic. Today, it’s the favored hotel for visiting dignitaries; the Prime Minister of Australia was a guest when we were there.

Ottawa was selected as the capital, in part because of its inland position, the War of 1812 having revealed how vulnerable to attack by Americans the country’s then-major cities—Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City—were, all located on the St. Lawrence River. Nevertheless, Ottawa had strong transportation connections via the Ottawa River, which joins the St. Lawrence and the Rideau Canal. For a tourist today, these waterways are part of the city’s charm.

Like any national capital, Ottawa offers numerous museums and tours of government and official residences. Especially interesting was the Canadian War Museum, where the story begins with early skirmishes with and among Native Americans and ends with Canada’s role in international peacekeeping efforts, spearheaded by Nobel Prize-winning former Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Much attention is given to the country’s contributions in World War I, where the nation attained international recognition, most notably at the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

Separately, tourists can visit the Diefenbunker, a Cold War-era underground shelter for the government’s most important officials (but not their families) in case of nuclear attack. The names comes from former Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker (Dief the Chief), who had it built some miles outside the capital. Elaborate though the design of the multi-storied bunker is, it was soon outmoded by increasingly powerful atomic weapons and the short warning times enabled by intercontinental ballistic missiles. The accompanying helipad has been used once.

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (photo: author)

The National Gallery of Canada is huge, its architecture a modern take on the gothic revival theme, with an entire floor devoted to Canadian artists. That’s where I spent my time, as I’m a huge fan of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

In the middle of this floor is the Rideau Chapel, disassembled and reconstructed from the to-be-demolished Convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Ottawa. A special exhibit there is Janet Cardiff’s “Forty-Part Motet,” separately recorded singing of a 16th-century choir piece by 40 voices played back through 40 speakers. Visitors can experience the piece as a whole, or, walking around the chapel, listen to individual voices. An amazing experience (audio clip excerpt–don’t miss).

The great thing is, there’s no pressure to see it all. You can easily spend an afternoon cruising the river, biking the canal path, or in the bustling ByWard market area sipping lemonade and contemplating which of the city’s many delightful restaurants you’ll visit that evening. A very special evening at Beckta deserves mention. I did not take a picture of my food.

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Automotive Report: LeMans Update

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car

(photo: author)

UPDATE: There’s a link to pix of last weekend’s 24-hour LeMans race, below, but New Jersey cars, not to be outdone, show real personality! The most recent parking lot find: the eyelash car. Remember the cars whose headlights would rotate closed when not in use? One of them wouldn’t be working right and would close only partway, making the car look half-asleep, when in New Jersey, that privilege is reserved for the driver.

carI’m intrigued by what the person with the do-it-yourself woodie is trying to accomplish.

Is he creating a lumber exoskeleton to give his vehicle some extra protection from his fellow drivers? Pointing out the inadequacy of materials or imagination in Toyota’s design? Making an artistic statement? And, is the upside-down Toyota emblem an international symbol of automotive distress?

 

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Plastic Guns

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meteor

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

In the hands of a good mystery/thriller writer, the presence of undetectable plastic guns can change the dramatic equation. But in case the real-life possibility of seriously lethal 3-D printed guns existing outside the weakly regulated firearms marketplace has been a problem barely on the edge of your consciousness, a threat like a massive meteor strike—remote, but awful—it’s time to give it further thought. A Wired article by Andy Greenberg, full of anonymous sources and YouTube videos of test-firings, shows how far this technology has come. Predictably, the cost of manufacture has plummeted as lethality has risen.

A combination of libertarians, gunsmiths, and technology enthusiasts has been improving on printable handgun and rifle designs, step-by-step, moving “3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.” And, Greenberg says, leaving “legislators and regulators in the dust,” despite the Undetectable Firearms Act. Another reason this situation is like a meteor strike is, given what we know—in this case about human behavior—these developments seem unstoppable.

The RFID article below suggests how a different technology can contribute to gun safety, too, for conventional handguns.

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