BREAKING NEWS FROM CANNES . . .

The word on the street—literally . . . well, from across the street—is that a film co-executive-produced by my friend and neighbor Scott Hainline has just been awarded a Silver Lion at the 56th annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. That’s very exciting news—and very cool! The film—Father’s Day—is part of a series of short films that Scott and his colleagues at Boston’s Hill Holliday advertising agency have developed for The Responsibility Project, a web-based spin-off of the series of “pay it forward” television commercials that Hill Holliday produced for the Liberty Mutual insurance company. To view this fine film, which clocks in at just 11 minutes, click here. Congratulations, Scott!

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE . . .

A couple of days ago, I read in pretty much one sitting a book titled Aerobleu by an author named Max Morgan. This book crossed my readerly radar screen by way of my interest in the Parisian jazz scene around the time of World War II, so I ordered a used copy and gave it a go. The book purports to be the diary of an American-born pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force who settles in Paris after the war. Published in facsimile hand-printed manuscript in a format resembling a pilot’s log (and, furthering that effect, the “log” comes in a metal case), the book presents an engaging account of the mysterious Max Morgan’s encounters with various jazz greats—including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker—who visited Paris in the years immediately following the war. The hands-off owner of a jazz club called Aerobleu, Morgan also becomes the owner of an old DC-3 airplane, which affords him side-adventures in North Africa and elsewhere; some of these adventures involve musicians hitching a ride with him and jamming en route.

Perhaps because it is written as a diary, the gaps in the probability of all this get obscured by the thin veneer of plausibility. Like the musicians, I too went along for the ride . . . pretty much until the end. One of my favorite moments in the narrative was when Morgan tells tales of Le Festival Internationale de Jazz in May of 1949. I was so willing to suspend my disbelief that I thumbed the wheel of my iPod until I came to the live recording of the Miles Davis / Tadd Dameron Quintet at that actual event; the recording is complete with voiceovers from a French radio commentator identifying the band members and the tunes! (One of the tunes is Dameron’s “Good Bait,” one of my personal favorite tunes to blow on in the jazz combo I play with.)

Of course I knew that it was all a work of fiction . . . but I didn’t know until I did some homework after finishing the book that it is both more than that and less than that: Aerobleu was actually part of an elaborate marketing ploy by a San Francisco-based agency called Less Than Seven. In an article in the Business section of the New York Times in October of 1997 (after Aerobleu was published), Stuart Elliott writes:

Remember Morgan, the free-spirited aviator, and Aerobleu, the jazz club he ran in Paris after World War II? Remember those all-night jam sessions in Morgan’s DC-3 en route to London, New Orleans and New York? Remember his mysterious disappearance in Havana as Castro was coming to power?

Well, if you remember those events, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn someone may want to sell you, because they’re all imaginary. What is real, however, is a line of merchandise—now being sold by stores across the country—focused on Morgan and his fabulous though fictitious life style.

In other words, the book was simply the tail wagging the dog of a much larger enterprise involving the selling of posters, coffee mugs, clothing, and other accessories all calculated to cash in on an American nostalgia for iconic jazz and the romantic allure of Paris. The essential non-literariness of the diary format was perfect in every respect: it was literate but not dauntingly so, and was grounded just enough in “reality” to draw susceptible readers into its web of intrigue. While I enjoyed the narrative for what it was, I have to admit that I enjoyed even more finding out afterwards exactly what it was!

But I have to admit further that the greatest pleasure I took was in tuning in to a telltale false note just five pages into the narrative when, in a diary entry dated Wednesday, August 7, 1946, Max Morgan recalls an event from the previous year: “That Charlie Parker concert at Town Hall in September was mesmerizing.” Indeed it was . . . except that it was in June of 1945, not September—a forgivable slip . . . if not for the narrator’s unforgivable failure to note a truly distinguishing feature of that concert, which headlined Dizzy Gillespie as well as Parker: that Parker was a no-show until partway through the opening tune, “Bebop,” when he suddenly appeared on the stage. Could anyone actually there have forgotten such an unlikely entrance? Probably not. Could the corporate creator of Max Morgan and Aerobleu have known that little detail? Definitely not, as the acetate discs of the concert were discovered, restored, and released on CD only in 2005, sixty years after the concert—and eight years after the book’s publication. But when I read that reference to the concert, I remembered right away how in his introduction of the night’s proceedings radio host Symphony Sid Torin hesitated for a second before mentioning that Don Byas would be substituting for Parker to start the concert. I thumbed my way to that on my iPod too, after I closed the cover on Aerobleu.

JEFF BECK TURNED 65 TODAY . . .

Jeff Beck turned 65 today. Sheesh . . . if he’s that old, what does that say about me? (Well, I’m not that old . . .) As a tip of the cap to him, tonight I tuned in to his classic jazz-rock fusion album Blow by Blow—one of the few albums that I’ve had on vinyl, on cassette, and on CD. (Should I mention how much I like it?)

Well, despite his age, he is still going strong; in fact, he recently performed in the Boston area—I missed the show but the Boston Globe gave it a rave review. I wonder if he had his amazing young bass player Tal Wilkenfeld with him. Check out this YouTube video of Beck and Tal performing “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” one of the tunes originally recorded on Blow By Blow.

iTUNING IN . . .

For years, I had an iPod that held around 4000 tunes. When I first got it, that capacity seemed far more than enough, but I eventually exceeded that limit and had to resort to cycling certain CDs and artists and songs in and out of the mix, depending on my listening interests or moods at any given time. (Not that I could ever have listened to 4000 tunes non-stop . . . but the potential to do so was certainly “empowering”!) Inevitably, that overworked iPod gave up the ghost and I graduated to a model that will hold upwards of 20,000 tunes . . . which means no more cycling . . . which also means that as I’ve built my library up to more than 7000 tunes I’m rediscovering (or at least revisiting) certain recordings that were part of the “cycling” program. I have to say that I’ve taken particular pleasure in re-tuning in to a couple of recordings featuring friends of mine.

One of those is a CD titled Must I Holler by a band with a highly unlikely—and thus highly memorable—name: Whoa! Man! Jesus! If I recall correctly, the name derives from the responses the band heard from their first awestruck audience: a literal case of first impressions becoming lasting impressions. I regret that I never got to see W!M!J! perform live; for a while they had regular gigs at local venues (always late on weekend nights when I would be on chauffeur duty for my teenage daughters), and they also did a bit of touring. Rumor has it that the band has now disbanded. But they live on by way of Must I Holler, which captures them in all their “roots music” glory. Comprising two guitars and drums (one of the guitarists being my friend Wayne Rhodes), the trio performs a heady hybrid of blues-folk-delta boogie distinguished by a catchy rhythmic pulse, earthy vocals, and sinuous slide-guitar work. They are a tight unit, and I have to say that there’s something contagious about their songs (including a couple that attempt to detach Jesus from the clutches of the American religious right wing). Beyond their CD, W!M!J! lives on via YouTube—some live performances and also a very engaging MTV-style video of “O Rosalyn,” the opening tune on their CD.

Another CD that I re-loaded onto my iPod is Winter Gifts by Peter Janson, who teaches guitar and directs the student jazz ensemble at UMass Boston. As its title suggest—and as the specific tunes reinforce—this CD has a “seasonal” flavor to it; perhaps that it is why, when I first listened to it a year or so ago, I immediately thought of mulled wine! Listening to it recently, though, I’ve modified my tasting metaphor: Peter’s delicately inflected arrangements for finger-style solo acoustic guitar actually bring to my mind the language used by reviewers of fine wines—“a hint of toasted hazelnut with floral notes and black cherry accents,” for example. In others words, his playing is highly nuanced, whether cued up as background music or as music to be listened to attentively. To my ears, this CD fully justifies the accolades Peter has received over the years from acoustic guitar aficionados. Winter Gifts was in our Holiday Season mix last December; I'm happy to have it permanently on my iPod now.

WONDERING ABOUT THE WANDERERS . . .

Many years ago—maybe even twenty-five years ago—I caught just a few snippets, on TV, of a movie that intrigued me partly because of its rock ’n’ roll soundtrack and partly because of the stylish visual impact of its dress-coded rival gangs in the Bronx in the early 1960s. Despite my catching those snippets on my old 12-inch black-and-white telly, two scenes in particular stuck with me vividly: one was of a gang distinguished by their bald heads; the other was of another gang, decked out in bowling-style jackets, parading through the streets, the members whistling up at windows to summon additional members to join them as they staked their claim on the inner-city turf. That movie was The Wanderers, released in 1979.

So . . . fast-forward to last night, when I finally got to see the movie in its entirety . . . but not before reading the book—of the same title, by Richard Price—that it is based on. Price’s current claim to literary fame is Lush Life, which I have on hand and will get to eventually; but The Wanderers (1974)—his first book—has its merits as well. More a collection of linked stories than a novel per se (it lacks the coherent narrative arc of a novel, though the final story does help to tie matters together thematically), The Wanderers depicts not just gang-life in NYC circa 1963 but also the individual lives of gang members as they move through adolescence toward the uncertain responsibilities of early adulthood. A bit rough around the edges stylistically, it nonetheless illuminates both the social and the anti-social dimensions of street gangs.

Directed by Philip Kaufman (who co-wrote the script with his wife Rose Kaufman) and starring Ken Wahl as Richie Gennaro and John Friedrich as Joey Capra, the movie version of The Wanderers is, for my money (I bought it on DVD), more enduring than the book version. Taking liberties with the book—condensing or eliding characters and scenes, eliminating some characters and scenes altogether and adding others—it yet does justice to Price’s original literary vision while also achieving its own cinematic integrity: by turns dramatic, melodramatic, comedic and tragic, it is irresistibly engaging from start to finish. (Presumably Price would agree with that estimation, as he actually enjoys a cameo appearance in the film . . .) Of course, both book and film present highly sanitized versions of gang warfare, yet there are also elements of grittiness and candor that testify to Price’s personal boyhood intimacy with the real-life gangs—the Fordham Baldies, the Del Bombers, the Ducky Boys—that serve as his models.

It took me almost a full quarter-century to focus in on the Technicolor feature film that had teased me in black-and white. But ultimately the film proved to be even more satisfying than I expected; and discovering the book of The Wanderers was a bonus.

UPDIKE . . . IN THE AIR AND ON THE BRAIN

John Updike is in the air. Last weekend the Kennedy Library in Boston hosted a symposium on his work and the New York Times Book Review included a review of his posthumously-published book of stories My Father’s Tears. Prompted by his death earlier this year, I already had Updike on my summer reading list; I guess those further prompts put him on my brain, so I decided finally to sit down with his novel Rabbit, Run. For whatever reason, I have not tuned in much to Updike. I know that I read his much-anthologized short story “Lifeguard” when I was an undergrad . . . and I think that I must not have liked it: that might have been enough to put Updike on my “non-essential” list. But recently I re-taught his just-as-much-anthologized short story “A & P,” which I quite like. In between I’ve read odds and ends—his iconic piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” for example, on Red Sox legend Ted Williams’ last at-bat, in 1960: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”—so it famously begins. And I've read quite a few of his book reviews in The New Yorker . . . though with those reviews I always felt like I was listening in on a conversation between Updike and his loyal readers that had begun decades earlier. . . .

Having now just finished Rabbit, Run, I can appreciate some of what I’ve been missing over the past few decades. Updike’s protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is a thoroughly unlikable lout—an anti-hero in a literal as well as a literary sense—but the novel itself is compelling reading. I’ve never paid any attention to Updike as a poet (though I know he’s prolific) but there is certainly a lyric poet’s sensibility at work in the authorial eye for detail that defines the narrative. At the same time, there is a natural-born storyteller’s sensibility at work in the utterly persuasive symbiotic development of plot and character. And not just of Harry’s character: the Episcopalian minister Jack Eccles, his earnestness serving as an essential counterweight to Harry’s protracted adolescence, is fully engaging in his own right and steals several of the novel’s finely-wrought scenes. In fact, the novel comprises scene after scene that read as wonderful set pieces, with various characters coming to the fore, yet each and every one of these scenes integrates seamlessly into the narrative as a whole.

One of the scenes that I found particularly intriguing from a literary standpoint involves Ruth, Harry’s paramour (a far more polite term than Harry himself would use!). Is it just coincidental that her musings on Harry in a three-and-a-half page interior monologue about halfway through the novel remind me of Molly Bloom’s musings in the “Penelope” episode that closes James Joyce’s Ulysses? Perhaps . . . but factoring in that he names Harry’s foil “Eccles,” which is the name of the northside Dublin street where Molly and Leopold Bloom live, I suspect that Updike is giving a nod of acknowledgment in Joyce’s direction. Fueled by booze, Harry’s wife Janice’s interior monologue, later in the novel, is not quite so Molly-esque, though her resentment toward her husband’s sexual advance toward her shortly after childbirth also has a familiar ring to it: “Makes you feel filthy they don’t even have decent names for parts of you.” Hmmm . . .

Part of what makes Harry Angstrom so unlikable is his relative youth: he is in his mid-twenties . . . yet he wallows in an angst that would be a far better fit on a man twenty or thirty years his senior—Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, perhaps, or even Larry McMurtry’s Duane Moore. Still, I will probably—eventually—revisit this character by way of Updike’s sequels to Rabbit, Run: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Maybe “Rabbit” redeems himself somewhere along the way . . .

SOUTH OF BOSTON . . .

A couple of days ago I drove my niece to T. F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island. As we passed through Providence on I-95, she quizzed me about the city, which she had never seen before. I didn’t have much to say: I’ve been there a few times for college basketball or hockey games at the Civic Center; I’ve been to a couple of fine theater productions at the Performing Arts Center; I’ve been to Providence College a couple of times for academic reasons; I dropped off one of my daughters at Brown University so she could visit a friend . . . I guess I was a bit muted in my enthusiasm, but I didn’t try to explain that most of my vaguely unfavorable impressions of the city were formed—perhaps unfairly—back in 1989 by a couple of pieces written by Boston Globe columnist Jack Thomas: “Providence a ‘hot city’? Heaven help us!” and “Providence reconsidered: It’s still Palookaville.” Since then the city has had a big upgrade (they even re-routed the river that runs through it) . . . but I still remember taking perverse pleasure in Thomas’s scathingly funny exposés of Providence’s flaws and foibles at that time.

So maybe it wasn’t coincidental that the book I chose to start my “summer reading period” (June thru August) was Geoffrey Wolff’s 1986 novel titled . . . Providence. Of course, any book with that title has to have a metaphorical dimension to it, and most likely an echo of Paradise Lost: “The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” But if there is an element of divine guidance in the lives of Wolff’s characters, it must be subsumed into the grit of day-to-day existence in the grim world he inscribes in the novel. Wolff’s portrait of Providence is hardly flattering; here is the pride of place filtered, with only a trace of authorial irony, through the consciousness of one of his lowlife criminal characters:

If you lived in a jerkwater that outsiders bombed past on their way to Cape Cod, if you lived fifty miles south of a city that called itself The Hub, if you spent time telling people you chose to live in Providence because who needed the hassle of a big city, who needed to spend an hour looking for a parking place, who needed the pressure—well, if you lived in Providence it was difficult not to feel a shiver of pride when you were reminded (and you were reminded) that the whole New England mob got run out of a laundry on Atwells Avenue.

But as a novel—well, as a crime novel (for that is what it really is)—Providence is really quite engaging. (And I do not read many crime novels . . .) While he inclines at times more toward telling than showing—substituting lengthy passages of center-of-consciousness oblique narrative for direct action and dialogue—Wolff clearly applies his writerly skills to the task he sets for himself, and the result is a page-turner. An ensemble piece centered around five characters—a terminally ill defense lawyer and his wife plus a corruptible police lieutenant and a small-time crook with wise-guy ambitions who share an attraction to a doozey of a floozy—the novel has some nicely finessed twists and turns of plot which allow the complexity of the characters to emerge naturally.

I had no intention of starting my summer reading with a novel like this—and certainly not with this very novel, which I happened to pick up just the day before I drove my niece through Providence. But it proved to be a good read . . . and thus a good start to the summer.

D. IT IS WRITTEN . . .

As I pretty much confessed in a post-Oscar post in February, I am not the world’s biggest movie buff, and although I attend an Oscar party with diehard moviegoers pretty much every year, I generally ante up for my daughters and let them fill in ballots in the winner-take-all voting pool. But last night I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire, and I wish now that I had been filling in a ballot myself in this past Oscar season. I thought the film was terrific from start to finish and would have slotted it in as winner not only in the “obvious” categories—Best Picture and Best Director—but also (why not pretty much run the table?) Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography and Writing (Adapted Screenplay): all the categories in which it got the Oscar nod. Hey, I could have picked up some decent walking-around money!

But part of what intrigued me immediately about the movie was not its overall engaging effect on so many levels (all of the above categories—and more) but its improbable ending, which brings together Jamil and Latika in a moment promising a happily-ever-after future. The movie itself concedes the improbability—even the implausibility—of this ending by showing during the closing credits an unlikely ensemble dance sequence, featuring Dev Patel (Jamil) and Freida Pinto (Latika), delightfully choreographed to the popular Hindi song “Jai Ho.” Part of the effect is to remind us of and/or to test the strength of our viewerly “willing suspension of disbelief” that necessarily kicks in during the film if we are to be engaged and entertained by it at all: it’s just a movie, the movie itself announces to us . . . at the end! Another dimension of the effect is to acknowledge that in its entirety—despite all the trappings of “realism”—the movie is really a “romance,” a fictionalizing of “reality” that (as Nathanial Hawthorne puts it) “sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” yet it has “fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” At least that’s how I see it in a reflex response . . .

And I see it that way partly in light of my experience teaching Chet Raymo’s novel The Dork of Cork (and its film adaptation Frankie Starlight) this past semester. In the novel, the protagonist Frank Bois is the author of a memoir titled Nightstalk, of which his editor remarks: “I think the reader would have felt cheated by a happy ending.” That’s certainly how some of my students felt about the ending of Raymo’s book which frames Nightstalk. Some of them were quite unforgiving, despite Raymo’s embedding in the novel an analogue to the improbable relationship between Frank and the object of his childhood adoration, Emma. This analogue is in the form of a tale (ultimately from Chinese mythology) involving Vega the Weaving-girl and Altair the Herd-boy that Jack Kelly, Emma’s stargazing father, shares with young Frankie: “Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, at the height of summer, the lovers are allowed to meet when a bridge of birds briefly spans the stream of stars.” Unlike Simon Beaufoy, however, the screenwriter for Slumdog Millionaire, Raymo does not quite compose for himself the escape clause that Slumdog director Danny Boyle has appear on-screen in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” fashion:

D. It is written

Raymo’s novel begins with the sentence “Begin with beauty.” But it is really a novel about beauty and brokenness—even “ugliness”—as Frank himself articulates: “Beautiful and sinister. Jack thought I didn’t understand. But I understood. I was eight or nine years old, but even then I understood how beauty and hurt get jumbled up together. Even then I had seen how long are the shadows that beauty casts.” So when we see Frank and Emma—the Herd-boy and the Weaving-girl—at the end of the novel (and of Frankie Starlight) we might wonder whether the happily-ever-after ending of their narrative is really as “beautiful” as that afforded Jamil and Latika. Hmmm . . . Late in The Dork of Cork, Frankie may be speaking for his author when he muses: “I like the sense of completion, of tying up loose ends . . .” Slumdog Millionaire happens to tie up its loose ends with a dance sequence and a flowing yellow scarf!