Rock & roll tours of the Jersey Shore

Well, I ain't giving them, but there are people who do, and you can find out about them here. In the meantime, the next best thing is the third edition of their book ROCK AND ROLL TOUR OF THE JERSEY SHORE, which has just been released. Stan and Jean are long-time locals, and this is one of the few books of its type not plagued with factual and geographic inaccuracies (another is Daniel Wolff's great 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK: A HISTORY OF THE PROMISED LAND, which I wrote about at length when it came out back in 2005).


ROCK AND ROLL TOUR is both a great reference book and an evocative time capsule, tracing the glory days of the Asbury Park/Jersey Shore music scene past, present and (hopefully) future. Full disclosure: The book features two anecdotes penned by me - one about a chance 3 a.m. encounter in Asbury Park back in 1984, and the other about a confrontation with an angry and tired Clarence Clemons a year later, when I was a young reporter for The Asbury Park Press and subject to the stupid ideas and humiliating assignments thought up by senior editors.

More trivia and prizes later this week. Also, possibly, a small announcement about something people have been asking me about for awhile.

Thought for the day ...

... or maybe the decade.

"Perseverance is where the gods dwell."

- Director Werner Herzog, quoting a Peruvian saying.

More Stark raving

I've received a couple e-mails since last week, bemoaning the fact that my Forgotten Book Fridays choice - the 1967 Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark novel THE RARE COIN SCORE - is not only out of print, but pretty much unavailable from used book vendors
for less than $30, and often closer to $100. Unfortunately, it's the same way with many of the later Stark books, especially from 1966's THE SEVENTH (aka "The Split") through 1974's BUTCHER'S MOON, which may be the rarest of them all (at right is the original Fawcett Gold Medal edition of 1969's THE SOUR LEMON SCORE).

Coincidentally, just this week comes news (to me at least) that the University of Chicago Press, of all people, plans to reprint all the Parker novels in chronological order, beginning in September with THE HUNTER (aka "Point Blank," aka "Payback"), THE MAN WITH THE GETAWAY FACE and THE OUTFIT. Not since the 1985 Avon paperback editions has someone actually pulled this off. In the early 1980s, Gregg Press published a handful of the early ones in limited edition hardcovers, and on the heels of the 1999 Mel Gibson film PAYBACK, Mysterious Press/Warner Books reprinted some of the earlier novels along with the most recent (with somewhat generic covers). Now even those are out of print. Here's hoping U of C stays the course.

Forgotten Book Friday

... in which I pick up Patti Abbott's tag-team effort of assembling a list of books which, in her words, "we love but might have forgotten over the years."

I've done this sort of thing on the blog before, with "One Book and Beyond," an extension of The Rap Sheet's One Book Project from last year. I've previously written about Leonard Gardner's FAT CITY, Jonathan Valin's EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES, Lawrence Block's THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD and Anthony Lee's MARTIN QUINN.



This time, though, I want to go back even farther, to 1967's THE RARE COIN SCORE, Donald E. Westlake's ninth "Richard Stark" novel about a hardcore professional thief named Parker. Parker needs no introduction, but unfortunately THE RARE COIN SCORE has been effectively out of print since the 1985 Avon paperback edition. That's too bad, because in my mind it's the quintessential Parker novel, the uberStark.

It was first published as a paperback original (cover above) by Fawcett Gold Medal, under the editorship of the legendary Knox Burger, and adorned with a classic Robert McGinnis cover. Despite its almost generic title (when the series moved from Pocket Books to Fawcett, the first four books used the word "Score" in their titles), RARE COIN SCORE is a landmark book in the series. It was a revamped Parker with a new publisher and a major new character, Claire, who would become Parker's regular woman for the rest of the series (she figures prominently in the latest, this year's DIRTY MONEY).

SCORE also has maybe the greatest opening line in Starkdom:

Parker spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, but he was restless, and one day without thinking about it he checked out and sent a forwarding address to Handy McKay and moved on to New Orleans.

The second sentence is just as good:

He took a room in a downtown motel and connected with a girl folk singer the first night, but all she did was complain how her manager was lousing up her career, so three days later he ditched her and took up with a Bourbon Street stripper instead.

(The previous eight Parker books had all begun with the word "When," a device that returned in 1997's COMEBACK and continues to this day.)

Revolving around the robbery of the bourse room at a coin show in Indianapolis, SCORE is Parker at his leanest and meanest, both in terms of character and prose (the original Gold Medal edition runs only 160 pages). It also contains scenes in which the writing is so simple and direct - yet evocative - that they've stuck with me ever since I first read them. Here's one, the beginning of Part One, Chapter Eight:

"I must be a masochist," Claire said. She was sitting up in the bed, knees up, arms wrapped around her legs.

Parker, lying beside her, said "I hadn't noticed."

She gave him a quick smile, then looked away again, saying, "I'm always attracted to men who are about to get killed."

"Not always," said Parker. "Light me a cigarette."

"What, not you? You're the worst of them all." She took the cigarette and matches from the night table, lit two cigarettes and gave him one. "The first boy I ever - ever went around with, drove in stock car races every weekend. His left leg was all scars from an accident."

Parker said, "Ashtray."

This is also the only Stark novel I remember in which Parker shoots a relative innocent, gunning down a Pinkerton guard who draws on him during the course of the robbery. And in her first appearance, Claire is more the classic noir femme fatale, stringing along an amateur named Billy Lebatard until he gets the job in motion, then switching her allegiance to Parker, setting off a triangle that almost sours the whole plan. Think Marie Windsor in Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING.

THE RARE COIN SCORE is existential crime fiction at its best. It's also a master class in terse, effective writing. The fact that it - and so many of the other Stark novels - remains out of print is a crime.


(For my thoughts on Brian Helgeland's restored Parker adaptation PAYBACK: STRAIGHT UP - THE DIRECTOR'S CUT, see here. .)

"On the Outs"

As any honest media person will tell you, one of the great perks of being in the business is free stuff. Lots of it. Books, CDs, DVDs and more pour in unsolicited, their makers hoping to get even the slightest mention of their work in print or on air, anything to help it stand out from the thousands of other releases out there.

The down side? Lots of free stuff. More than one person could ever conceivably read or watch or listen to. It piles up in the mail like some great always-growing beast. The sheer volume of material keeps you from getting to most of it. You put things aside for further consideration and sometimes you get back to them. More often than not, you don't.

In 2006, Warner Home Video sent me a DVD of the independent film ON THE OUTS, which had gotten a brief theatrical release the previous year. I was intrigued enough by the box copy and review blurbs to add it to the To Be Watched pile. There it languished, constantly superseded by newer releases, until last week.

My loss. ON THE OUTS is an absolutely stunning first feature by co-directors Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnick. Filmed on location in Jersey City, N.J., it follows the intersecting stories of three troubled teenage girls. At 15, Suzette (Anny Mariano) has been sheltered from the streets by her hardworking mother - until she falls under the spell of a charming 25-year-old thug. Marisol (co-creator Paola Mendoza) is a 17-year-old single mom trying to raise her two-year-old daughter and battling a drug addiction. And Oz (Judy Marte, above, left, in an extraordinary performance) is a teenage crack dealer, struggling to care for her mentally retarded brother and hold her own fragile family together.

Silverbush and Skolnick based their film on real cases and people they encountered while taking part in a three-month workshop at the Hudson County Juvenile Detention Center in Secaucus, N.J. And it shows. Nearly every second of ON THE OUTS crackles with authenticity. It carries the same charge as Martin Scorsese's MEAN STREETS, but without that film's bravura theatricality. For much of its length, ON THE OUTS feels like a documentary, an intimate look into the lives of everyday people struggling to survive, but gradually being pulled down by the environment around them.

Not that there isn't hope to be found here. At the end of their respective storylines, all three girls encounter traumatic events that make them reassess their lives. Will they escape from the cycles that have so limited them? ON THE OUTS leaves that question unanswered. But you'll be thinking about those girls - and this film - for a long time to come.

Slight return

Apologies for the lack of posts - and to anyone who e-mailed me in the last three weeks - but an unexpected illness sidelined me for awhile. Should be back to normal posting by next week.

In the interim, congrats to Megan Abbott, the winner of this year's Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original for her great retro-noir QUEENPIN. I missed the ceremony, unfortunately, but was happy to see her well-deserved win.

And finally, after seven weeks and many incorrect responses, we have a winner of sorts for the fifth trivia question. See the update here.

Danny Federici: 1950-2008

Farewell to The Phantom. "4th of July, Asbury Park" will never sound the same again.


Or this ....

Farewell to THE WIRE

And if there was ever a more emotional moment in television history than Bubs' ascension up the stairs to his family's dinner table, I don't know what it is ...

Over at The House Next Door, I've offered my own brief contribution to their ongoing and stellar WIRE coverage, a reading list for those feeling the first pangs of withdrawal. There's also lots of great stuff to be found here, including an exclusive post-finale Q&A with David Simon.

It was a great run. I'm gonna miss it.

Why I love Lorrie Moore

Well, one of many reasons ...

In addition to being one of America's greatest short story writers (though she hasn't had a book out since 1998's BIRDS OF AMERICA), she is also an unparalleled master of the opening line.

Witness this, from her 1986 novel ANAGRAMS:

Gerard Maines lived across the hall from a woman named Benna, who four minutes into any conversation always managed to say the word "penis." He was not a prude, but, nonetheless, it made him wince.

The great lost movie trivia contest mystery

As many of you know, for the last seven years I've written something called the Ultimate Post-Internet Movie Trivia Contest for The Star-Ledger of Newark. It was a series of alternating simple/difficult - sometimes *very* difficult - movie trivia questions (79 last year), with the grand prize being an all-expenses-paid four-day trip for two to Hollywood.

And, as many of you also heard, this year's quiz fell victim to space and budget cutbacks. It is, as they say, kaput. However, it was about halfway written when the plug was pulled (it was to contain 80 questions, to commemorate the 80th year of the Oscars) and some of the questions are just too good to never see the light of day.

So, over the next few weeks, I'm going to occasionally post some of the unpublished questions here - one at a time - and the first person who messages me at my site with the correct answer will win something. No trips, unfortunately - more like CDs, DVDS and books - but there will always be an item or two to make it interesting. Be warned though, the questions will be on the *difficult* side of the scale - no easy giveaways here (and, of course, The Star-Ledger is in no way, shape or form affiliated with or responsible for ... etc etc).

I'll post the first question - and information about the prize - here Sunday afternoon, Feb. 24, 2008 - Oscar night - at around 4 p.m. ET. See you then.

****
And, in the meantime, enjoy this inspirational trailer .

Roy Scheider 1932-2008

Many years ago, I read an interview with author Richard Matheson in which he discussed the film versions of his apocalyptic vampire novel I AM LEGEND (at that point, there were only two, 1964's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, starring Vincent Price, and 1971's THE OMEGA MAN, with Charlton Heston). Matheson hadn't been happy with either film - or actor - and told the interviewer he always felt the perfect choice to play Robert Neville would be Roy Scheider, because he personified the normal, non-heroic guy forced to cope with extreme circumstances.

Matheson's description nails it. Scheider was a '70s icon to be sure, but he was also the Everyman hero, the audience surrogate in such high-intensity films as JAWS and THE FRENCH CONNECTION, the self-doubter who nonetheless manages to muster the courage and wherewithal to do what has to be done.

A Jersey guy who (like me) attended Rutgers University, Scheider earned his movie star looks the hard way. His famous broken nose was a reminder of his boxing years (months?), when he fought in the N.J. Diamond Gloves Competition. His Everyday Guy presence grounded - and validated - almost everything he appeared in. THE SEVEN-UPS, Philip D'Antoni's follow-up to THE FRENCH CONNECTION, is an evocative 1970s New York time capsule, but it's not a great movie, except when Scheider's on screen - fortunately most of the time - as the head of an elite police unit (in CONNECTION, his character is named "Buddy Russo." In SEVEN-UPS, it's "Buddy Manucci"). He makes all that follows instantly believable.

He does the same for the character of Harry Mitchell in John Frankenheimer's 1986 52 PICK-UP (one of the best Elmore Leonard adaptations, aside from its logic-free ending, changed from the book), as a philandering - but still loving - husband, who's forced to face up to his own transgressions and extricate himself from a bind involving some very tough people, turning the tables on them in a surprising, but believable, way.

Back in April 1998, I attended the dedication of the Elaine Steinbeck Stage at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, N.Y. The widow of John Steinbeck, Elaine was one of the first female Broadway stage managers, having worked on productions such as OKLAHOMA!, OTHELLO and others. It was a small theatre - less than 300 seats - but it was packed with celebrities who'd come to honor Steinbeck (who was in the audience) and perform on the newly renamed stage. Bruce Springsteen opened the evening with an acoustic version of OKLAHOMA!'s "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" (I've waited years for a tape of that to surface, still haven't found one) and closed it with a moving rendition of "The Ghost of Tom Joad." In between, there were dramatic readings from Roddy MacDowell and Gary Sinise, a performance from Betty Comden and Adolph Green and testimonials frorm Edward Albee, Terrence McNally, E.L. Doctorow and others. It was quite the night.

But I think I was most starstruck to see Scheider - sitting about three rows from the back, low-key as ever, looking dapper but slightly frail. As the evening ended and the mingling began, I considered making my way through the crowd to tell him how much I enjoyed his films, for the same reasons I mentioned above. By the time I gathered my courage, he was gone. And that I regret.

Heroin chic

When it comes to putting true-life stories on screen, Hollywood likes to embellish. That's no surprise. However, in the case of Ridley Scott's AMERICAN GANGSTER, there may actually be more embellishment than fact, as the Associated Press has reported. In addition, some DEA agents were so angry with the way they were presented in the film that they sued. Also unhappy were the three undercover Newark police officers who actually did the street work that brought down Frank Lucas' empire. Lucas, played by Denzel Washington in the film, was already in custody by the time prosecutor Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) was brought in to help build an indictment against him.

But Hollywood is Hollywood, and if you want a more accurate look at that era and the Harlem heroin empire, check out Marc Levin's excellent documentary MR. UNTOUCHABLE, just out on DVD. It's the story of Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, the *real* heroin kingpin of Harlem in the 1970s. Like Lucas, Barnes eventually turned state's evidence and testified against his former partners, leading to dozens - if not hundreds - of convictions.

Barnes is now in the Witness Protection Program, but Levin and co-producer Mary-Jane Robinson tracked him down and got him to agree to sit for a series of interviews (his face is concealed and his voice slightly distorted when he's on screen). It's buttressed with a series of extensive interviews with former Barnes colleagues and the law enforcement officers who eventually brought him down and got him to turn. All point to Barnes' appearance on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1977 (above right) as the act that precipitated his downfall. Worried that the Times would use a mugshot of him (above left) to illustrate the story, Barnes agreed to pose for a Times photographer. When President Jimmy Carter saw the story that Sunday, he placed a call to U.S. Attorney General Griffen Bell. At 8 a.m. the next morning Bell informed the New York Attorney General's Office that Barnes had just become their No. 1 priority.

Also worth checking out are the DVD's many supplementary interviews and features, including a videotaped conference call - from Levin's office - between Barnes and Lucas.

Stars in the night

I'm a little late in getting around to posting this, but I did attend the 73rd annual New York Film Critics Circle awards at Spotlight in Times Square Jan 6., which was much fun but slightly surreal. Kyle Smith of the New York Post wrote a snarky, but fairly dead-on, synopsis of the night.

Other quick impressions:

- I've always admired Sarah Polley's aloof, slightly otherworldly screen presence - she'd be great in a remake of Park Chan-wook's LADY VENGEANCE. But in person (I physically bumped into her at one point as she was racing across the floor to see someone) she's actually very young, cheerful and girly.

- Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem are both tall, and appear to have the same chin.

- Steve Buscemi gave the speech of the night, presenting the Coen Bros with their best director award. It was drink-spilling funny, though the Bros. - or at least Joel - seemed vaguely irritated through most of the evening.

- Ellen Barkin's dress was ... well, have a look yourself.

- Patricia Clarkson, whom I've loved from afar ever since I saw her in THE DEAD POOL, looked terrific and radiated such an aura of general niceness that she fairly glowed.

- In the Embarassing Moment Department, I approached and struck up a conversation with director Michael Almereyda, certain that I knew him from somewhere else. However, not only was I unable to establish where that might have been, but as he ran through his very substantial list of credits, I realized I hadn't seen any of his films. I *had* seen a great episode of DEADWOOD he directed, but by the time we got to that point, the conversation was in the last throes of a slow, painful death. Sorry about that, Michael.

The irony is, that particular episode contains the quintessential DEADWOOD speech, courtesy of Al Swearengen, which I can reel off the top of my head whenever my DW fan credentials are questioned:

"Pain or damage don’t end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man… and give some back.”

That night, thankfully, I kept it to myself.

Nightmare logic

Back at Rutgers University in the 1980s, I took a film criticism seminar with the great film critic (and, at that time, Penthouse columnist) Roger Greenspun. One of the dozen or so films we watched that semester was Francois Truffaut's MISSISSIPPI MERMAID, based on Cornell Woolrich's 1947 novel WALTZ INTO DARKNESS. Greenspun loved the film but dismissed the source material - and all of Woolrich's books - as "unreadable," a statement which drew laughter from the class.

I took exception - and offense. I was on a serious Woolrich kick at the time, having discovered him through the paperback reissues Ballantine Books had just done of his major novels, most of which were graced with moodily beautiful cover paintings by Larry Schwinger. I don't think I'd ever heard of Woolrich before I bought RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, solely on the basis of the cover art. In the year or so that followed, I read all the Ballantine reprints and went looking for more Woolrich. What Greenspun found unreadable, I found irresistible. I loved the mood, the ambiance, the urban nightscapes (New York, more often than not), and the pervasive atmosphere of dread, even if the plots didn't always make much, uh, sense. This was noir so strong it warped reality. The stories unfolded with the logic - and inevitability - of a nightmare.

I haven't seen - or heard of - Greenspun in years (he was a brilliant critic and an excellent teacher, despite his anti-Woolrich bias), but his words came back to me last week while reading Hard Case Crime's" reissue of Woolrich's 1950 novel FRIGHT. The jacket copy says it's the book's first reprinting in more than 50 years. Halfway into the novel, it was easy to see why. Some passages are literally unreadable - and yet there are others that are sheer noir poetry.


The plot is pure Woolrich. In the heat of anger, a man commits a horrible crime hours before his wedding, then skips town (New York, again) with his bride to start a new life elsewhere. But as his past - and his guilt - catches up with him, he ends up committing a series of crimes in order to cover up the first one, while his long-suffering - but not terribly bright - wife begins to realize he's not quite the happy-go-lucky guy she once thought him to be.

Here's part of the poetry, a shorthand description of a man on a bender in Manhattan, getting progressively drunker as he stumbles from bar to bar:

All at once there was a woman with him. She'd been with him for just a few minutes, she'd been with him for long, endless nights at a time. She kept changing her dress at intervals. And even her hair and face to go with it. First she was in pink, then suddenly she was in light green. As though a gelatin slide had revolved and cast a different tint over her... The bars were very unreliable tonight. They looked nice and steady, but he'd lean on them too heavily, or something. They'd tilt way up on one side, and slope all the way down on the other... The bars gave place to a sidewalk. A sidewalk that was straight up and down in front of his face.

And here's the, um, other part:

The night was like purple ink. And it was as though the bottle that had held the ink had been smashed against the sky by some insurgent celestial accountant. For heaven was pitted with its tiny, twinkling particles of broken glass. And there seemed to be no one up there to sweep them up. God's office was closed for the night.

Though it's set in 1915 (in his mind, Woolrich might well have romanticized that era, the way we now romanticize the New York of the 1930s and '40s), FRIGHT is classic Woolrich - evocative, unsettling and often downright loopy. It's not one of his great novels, by any means, but it's Woolrich through and through, from the comma splices to the over-the-top descriptive passages to the omnipresent feeling of guilt and undercurrent of sexual shame. And - most Woolrichian of all - the Doom that watches over us always, waiting for its moment to arrive.

Happy Holidays!

Val Lewton: Art vs. life

“Life isn’t a support-system for art,” Stephen King writes in his wonderful book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft." “It’s the other way around.”

Those words came back to me this week while watching the fascinating and sobering new documentary “Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows," produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese and premiering on TMC Jan. 14, with a DVD release to follow.

In the 1940s, Lewton was the unquestioned master of the American horror film. Tapped by RKO to produce a series of thrillers to compete with Universal - home to Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man - Lewton took a more subtle approach. Beginning with 1942's CAT PEOPLE and through the Boris Karloff-starring BEDLAM four years later, Lewton's films were moody, evocative, sensual, surprising and often disturbing. They included I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (loosely based on JANE EYRE), THE BODY SNATCHER (Karloff's greatest performance) and THE SEVENTH VICTIM, a deadly serious drama about a devil-worshiping cult in Greenwich Village that's a spiritual predecessor to ROSEMARY'S BABY. Lewton's films were the cinematic equivalent of the dark and haunted novels of Cornell Woolrich. He even adapted Woolrich's novel BLACK ALIBI into the classic 1943 film THE LEOPARD MAN.

Overseeing every aspect of the productions personally, from costumes to script rewrites, Lewton was a true auteur, even though he worked with - and mentored - a stable of talented directors, including Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson. Despite the constraints of both the censors and RKO's B-picture budgets, Lewton produced an unprecedented number of quality films in a short period. However, as Scorsese says in his narration, "He was always at war with his bosses, and he was never satisfied with his achievements."

When CAT PEOPLE became a surprise hit, it turned RKO's fortunes around. But Lewton was still bound to a contract and salary he referred to as "almost picayune." However, he refused to go along with the standard Hollywood practice of letting his agent break the contract and renegotiate. "I can't quite reconcile myself to that," he wrote at the time. "It's a great problem with me, self-interest against self-respect."

Instead, Lewton soldiered on, sometimes with less than a month between wrapping one film and beginning another. He produced four films in 1943 alone. Though his work was already being acclaimed by critics such as James Agee, to RKO Lewton was just another workhorse contract producer. Plagued by insomnia, Lewton soon found himself exhausted. "There's hardly a night ... that I got home before midnight," he wrote. "For the first time in my life, I am really tired."

The pace took its toll. He suffered his first heart attack in 1946 at age 42. After recovering, he eventually made his way to other studios, including Universal, where he produced only one film, the Western APACHE DRUMS. He had just signed on to work on an independent unit with up-and-coming producer Stanley Kramer when he suffered another - fatal - heart attack in 1951. He was 46.


TCM will follow MAN IN THE SHADOWS with a marathon of eight Lewton films. The documentary will also be available as a bonus disc on the revamped VAL LEWTON HORROR COLLECTION due out Jan. 29.

Tough chicks and the men who love them

This Thursday (12/6/2007),I'll be joining Megan Abbott, S.J. Rozan, Jonathan Santlofer, Alison Gaylin, Jason Starr, Reed Farrel Coleman and others (including Star-Ledger film critic and current New York Film Critics' Circle chairman Stephen Whitty) for a group signing at Partners & Crime in New York's Greenwich Village to celebrate the new Abbott-edited A HELL OF A WOMAN: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FEMALE NOIR, from Busted Flush Press.

The book collects 24 original stories by the likes of Sara Gran, Vicki Hendricks, Donna Moore, Vin Packer, S. J. and others. And although the stories are predominantly by women, a few token males round out the collection, including Ken Bruen, Eddie Muller and Daniel Woodrell.

The book also contains more than two dozen appreciations of "Favorite Women of Noir" by a wide selection of writers, of which I am one. Peter Spiegelman chose to write about Ella Raines, star of the classic PHANTOM LADY. Jason Starr muses on Carmela Soprano - you get the idea. I chose Gloria-Ann Cooper, the razor-wielding protagonist of Bob Ottum's once-bestselling-but-now-almost-forgotten 1977 novel THE TUESDAY BLADE.

Random Readings, Vol. 4

This installment of Random Readings is from Clive Barker's new novel MISTER B. GONE. Truer words ...

It was love that moved all things. Or rather, it was love and its theft, its demise, its silence, that moved all things. From a great fullness - a sense that all was well with things, and could be kept so, with just a little love - to an emptiness so profound that your bones whined when the wind blew through them: the coming and going between these states was the engine of all things.

Pontificating about Page 99

Out of town the next two weeks, with only intermittent internet access, so blogging will be minimal. However, in the meantime, the very busy Marshal Zeringue asked me to submit THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE to his patented Page 99 test (not to be confused with his Page 69 test). The results can be found here. It also also gave me a chance to go public about my hitherto-unspoken debt to writer/director James Gray's haunting LITTLE ODESSA.

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

And I think that says it all.

However, if you want more on Mailer (with whom I share a hometown, Long Branch, N.J.) be sure to visit here, which has maybe the best collection of links on the net, including this one, to a great Entertainment Weekly interview that was one of the last Mailer gave. We'll never see his like again.