#FridayReads, May 24–“Before the Frost,” a Kurt & Linda Wallander novel

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Henning Mankell photo#FridayReads Henning Mankell’s thriller 2004 thriller Before the Frost, featuring Detective Kurt Wallander and his grown daughter Linda, who like he did earlier in life, chooses to become a police officer. With surprising synchronicity, in Michael Connelly’s 2011 Detective Harry Bosch novel The Drop, (my May 10th #FridayReads), his teenage daughter informs him that she is going to choose police work for her career. I don’t believe these two writers, one in Sweden, the other in Los Angeles, read each other’s work or have directly influenced each other. Instead, I believe that with these authors–who have each written ten or more books featuring their detective protagonist–become extremely invested in their characters and loyal to them, so that in their protean creativity, they endow the two characters–late middle-aged single fathers in each series–with full lives and late-in-life-joy from growing closer to their own child. This highlights one of the things I love most about these books, Mankell’s and Connelly’s, as well as those by other authors I enjoy–featuring characters Travis McGee, Bernie Gunther, and Joe Gunther (no relation to the former), by John D. MacDonald, Philip Kerr, and Archer Mayor, respectively: The author is so devoted to their creation that they give them full lives, and I as a faithful reader, feel obliged to be solicitous of and devoted to them myself.Mankell photo

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Cleveland’s Pro Baseball Team, Mildly Renascent

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As readers of this blog will know, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and under the tutelage of my sports-loving dad, I became a fan, too. I remain a fan and a follower of all the Cleveland professional sports team, the NBA Cavaliers (By lottery this week they won the first pick in the upcoming collegiate draft, a pleasant prospect.); the NFL Browns (I attended the last Cleveland pro sports championship, when the Browns won the NFL title in 1964, two years before the minting of the Super Bowl.); and the baseball Indians (In case you wonder, I am tired of the nickname, embarrassed by it, and wish the franchise would dump it; I tend to just call them the Tribe or CLEVE. At least this year the front office, though still resisting calls to change names, they do seem to have sidelined the brazenly racial “Chief Wahoo” mascot logo.). The history of failure–or least, shortfalls of the ultimate goal–by my teams, hasn’t deterred my fanship, illustrated by a piece I wrote last year, How to Enjoy Sports Even When Your Teams Have a History of Failure.

The Tribe haven’t won a World Series since ’48. This season, so far, the team has been playing surprisingly well, and at the moment they lead their division by a half-game. In their past 25 games they must be playing at about a 17-win and an 8-loss clip. They could still collapse after July 4th, but things look bright right now.

The above is prelude to the fact that last night the Tribe opened a 4-game series in Boston vs. the Red Sox at Fenway Park. It was the first game back in Boston for Terry Francona, now the CLEVE manager, after he held the job in Boston for 8 years, until 2011. As this Cleveland Plain Dealer story reminds, he won two World Series championships during that tenure, and then was quite unceremoniously dumped by the BOSOX brain trust. I’m really glad Cleveland has him in the dugout now. I’m sure his calm leadership is one of the reasons the Tribe is playing so well this season. Who knows, maybe the team can keep it up.

Last night’s game ended up as a route, for my side. The Tribe scored early and often. Their march through the innings went like this: 1-0; 4-0; 4-3; 5-3; 6-3; 12-3, the final score. The Tribe currently leads the American League in homers, with 60, yet oddly last night, though hitting double digits in run production–though they had a total of 16 base hits, with 4 doubles and a triple–they did not hit a homer. Still, it’s alright, for as Mark Reynolds the Tribe’s leading basher with 12 HRs puts it in beat writer Paul Hoynes’ game story, “‘Sometimes, homers are rally killers,’ said [the DH/3rd baseman] with a laugh.”

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“Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology” Morphing into a Magazine

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rustbelt112912Readers of this blog may recall the contribution I made last year to the book Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, “Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern,” a personal essay about a bluesman I followed avidly all the years I lived in my hometown. Now, less than a year after the book’s release, the enterprise has gone so well that the editors of the collection are planning to create an an online magazine, Belt, that will expand the concept of the book in to a continuing forum for writing about Cleveland, and more broadly, the Industrial Midwest. Co-editor Anne Trubek has announced a Kickstarter campaign to which I will make a contribution, and I encourage you to consider doing the same. With three weeks to go before their deadline they’ve already gained pledges that take them to more than half of their $5,000 goal. Like me, you’re probably receiving a lot of requests like this these days–this is definitely one worth offering your support. Here’s a link to the Kickstarter page with a video about Belt. 2 Mr Stress album cover

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Josh Ritter in NYC, a Buoyant Showman at Terminal 5

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Josh RitterMy wife and son and I bought tickets for Josh Ritter’s May 18 gig at Terminal 5 back in the winter, shortly after the show was first announced. When the night finally arrived this past Saturday, we were excited we’d be hearing him live for the first time. It was also our first time hearing a show at this venue, and we were surprised and pleased by how smoothly Terminal 5 operated. Though we arrived earlier than 7 PM when the doors were scheduled to open, we were admitted immediately, sent up to a rooftop patio and soon allowed downstairs in the big performance space. Our early arrival meant we were very close to the stage when the opening act, the Felice Brothers, took to the stage. Though hailing from towns in NY’s Hudson Valley, I heard tinges of Tex-Mex rock from this likable 5-piece, along with echoes of Doug Sahm and his Texas Tornadoes, driven especially by the keyboard and accordion work of boisterous brother James Felice. They were a great warm-up band and I was glad I later I had a chance to buy their CD, “Tonight at the Arizona.”

After an interval to reset the stage, Josh Ritter stepped up to his mic right at 9:00 PM. He addressed the audience:  “It is so good to be here, this is my home now. Thank you for being here. We’re going to have an amazing night. If at any point in the show I look nervous, it’s  because I am.” With that he started finger-picking a Gibson acoustic guitar for his first song, “Idaho.” As he segued from his first song to his second, members of the Royal City Band began joining him on stage, with Sam Kassirer taking a seat at the keyboards, while Zachariah Hickman*, sporting an extravagant  handlebar moustache, picked up a Fender bass, followed by Austin Nevins on lead guitar and Liam Hurley on drums. The first song with the full band was “Southern Pacifica”–with its opening verse “Southern Pacific/Red, white and blue/Where are we running to,” and the  memorable chorus, “Remember me to Roxianna/You know she’s still lovely/Tell her I was on the move/Last time you saw me/That you only saw the back of my head.”

A bit more than halfway through the show, Josh spoke to the audience about his new album, “Beast on the Tracks,” a kind of breakup album written following his recent divorce. He alluded to the personal anguish that led to the composition of the new songs, and the resilience that allowed him to record them and, now sing them live for people, night after night, and do so joyously and not in sorrow.  As the band then moved in to playing the songs from “Beast,” Ritter became even more buoyant than earlier, even while some of his lyrics became darker. I was reminded of other breakup albums, almost a genre of its own: Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” released in 1975, and widely regarded as expressing his pain at the end of his marriage to the same Sara who he sings of in “Sara” from “Desire.” More recently, Canadian artist Kathleen Edwards released “Voyageur”–Rolling Stone reported she wrote the album after enduring a breakup of her own. 

For nearly two hours Josh Ritter and his fine band ranged widely across his rich repertoire, playing nearly 20 songs on the ride. Ritter is an exciting and ebullient performer, continually interesting to watch on stage. He lowers himself to his knees while continuing to strum his instrument; cups his hands to his mouth and howls like a wolf; turns his back to the audience to direct his band like a vested conductor; strides in close to Nevins as the sideman plays arcing lead riffs with clear tone; tosses away guitar picks like pistachio shells; and connects with everyone in the crowd like he’s playing and singing just for them. It was a thrill to hear and see him play live. His performance was a triumph of his winning personality. Below are pictures from this superb show, many taken by my wife, artist Kyle Gallup.

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Striving for a Rural Oasis Amid the Urban Jungle in Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery

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P1010945I’ll be eager to take in a new exhibit at the City Museum of New York, marking the 175th anniversary of Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, which its 19th century planners designed to be a pastoral enclave amid the cacophony of the ever-growing metropolis. According to the City Museum’s website, the exhibit “features original artifacts, sculptures, drawings, and Hudson River School paintings; historic documents; and photographs.” Even its antiquated spelling, with the hypen mid-name, rather like the New-York Historical Society, has a 19th century air about it.

Last October, I visited Green-wood for the first time–for the unveiling of the “Angel of Music,” a new memorial statue at the grave of pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk–and discovered that its 478 acres of rolling hills, big hardwood trees, and sparkling views of Manhattan and NY Harbor, make it a pastoral, soothing place for mourners to say goodbye to their loved ones. As the New York Times‘ Joseph Berger reports after a recent visit to Green-wood, the cemetery is still a pastoral balm to the daily cares of all city-dwellers. Here are some of the pictures I took on that day last fall, on a gorgeous Saturday that turned out to be just three weeks before Superstorm Sandy wrecked hundreds of trees and gravestones in the memorial park, damage they are still working to clean up in one of NYC’s most historic treasures.

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#FridayReads, May 10–“The Drop,” Michael Connelly; “A Man W/out Breath,” Philip Kerr; “Black Count,” Tom Reiss

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Friday Reads May 10

I’m so lucky to have so many terrific books to read this weekend and over the coming days. And, after these three, I’ve got a Henning Mankell novel I’ve never read, Before the Frost, a thriller that features not only his longtime series character, Kurt Wallander, but also his grown daughter Linda, who over several earlier books had voiced her ambition to become a police detective, like her father. In fact, the novel is officially dubbed “A Kurt and Linda Wallander Novel,” just as all the earlier ones were “Kurt Wallander” books. Interestingly, in Michael Connelly’s The Drop, featuring his series character Harry Bosch, the detective’s teenage daughter, Maddy, has told her father that she wants to become a police officer.

As I have written in earlier posts about Mankell’s books, I love his books, and all these detective authors for the loyalty over many books that they show to their characters. The cases become more engrossing and their characters more believable and more sympathetic the deeper you read in to each series. This is certainly also true for Philip Kerr’s whose A Man Without Breath I started this afternoon. This is the ninth book portraying Bernie Gunther, the German police inspector trying to somehow stay alive during WWII, while retaining his dignity and moral center, while the Nazis all around him engage in mayhem and corrupt self-dealing. I’ve also posted often about the Gunther books.

As for Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, I met Tom Reiss and heard him read from his book at the National Book Critics Circle annual awards ceremony in March, and was enchanted by what I heard of his biography of Alexandre Dumas’ father. More recently, his book won the Pulitzer Prize. I read Chapter One last night, in which Reiss explains how he came to discover the elder Dumas, a remarkable figure who had been all but lost to history. I’m really eager to get back to his book, and so glad I have this nonfiction to balance all my novel reading.

Please note, if you want to read any of the books I’ve written about in this post, I’ve embedded links in each title. If you click on them, it will lead you to pages at Powell’s Books where you can order them. As I explain in a note near the upper right corner of this site, they then return a portion of your purchase price to me to help maintain this site.

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Ray Harryhausen, Pioneer of the Imagination and a Good Man

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In my family, the passing this week of Ray Harryhausen evoked real sadness, along with fond memories and appreciation for this film pioneer who was–as we learned when my son Ewan, now a teenager, was just a toddler–also an extremely kind and gentle man. When Ewan was young he steadily worked his way through a movie diet that included many of the science fiction and adventure classics–“King Kong,” “The Blob,” “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and once he discovered them, all the films that Harryhausen worked his magic on: “Mysterious Island,” “20,000,000 Miles to Earth,” “The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” the three Sinbad features, “The Valley of Gwangi,” and from the early years of Harryhausen’s career, his Mother Goose fairy tales, which were reissued beginning in 2002. What’s more, TCM, in addition to showing the movies to which Harryhausen had contributed, aired and re-aired a fine documentary about his career, “Master of Fantasy.” We learned from this about his friendship with Ray Bradbury, going back to their days as chums in Los Angeles. I’m sure it was a blow to Ray Harryhausen when his lifelong friend died last June.

Safe to say, that much as our son came to love these movies, so did my wife and I, capturing as they did great imagination and vivid storytelling. Ewan even adapted his own form of stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s signature technique, to make some short videos of his own. In 2004, when Ewan was just 7, Harryhausen came to Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for a special screening of some of his films. I had to be in the Bay Area for a publishing sales conference, but Ewan and Kyle got tickets and went to the theater for this special occasion. After the films were shown, they met Ray, and as the pictures below show, he was warm, charming, and very patient while photos were taken of him with Ewan. He autographed our copy of his book,  Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, and the two left of them, feeling they had just met a really fine and nice man. I”m sure that one of the reasons Ewan has a creative spirit and a questing imagination is thanks to his early enchantment with the work of Harryhausen. Below is a video a fan compiled with many of the creatures and monsters Ray crafted, from “Mighty Joe Young” to the rattling skeletons of “Jason and the Argonauts” and pictures from the day Kyle and Ewan met him, along with other images of Harryhausen’s work.

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Whistleblower Suit Targeting Big Pharma’s Novartis Gives Me Schadenfreude

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In 2011 a senior communications executive at Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, contacted me about editing a manuscript, their in-house history. I made a proposal for the job, we discussed a schedule, with me suggesting that I would bill them at different junctures as the edit moved forward and as he judged each segment of my work acceptable. We also discussed beginning the process with a signing payment, a portion of my total fee, as we got underway. For a few days it looked like we would be working together. Then I got surprising news from him. I guess he’d not earlier worked with independent contractors, because he informed me now that Novartis makes no payments to freelancers sooner than 60 days from when an invoice is accepted. It seemed beyond high-handed that this multi-billion dollar corporation would feel free to simply stipulate this odious policy to outside vendors doing work for the company. I objected but he told me there would be no flexibility on this point. Because I didn’t relish the prospect of working many weeks without pay–particularly when my work would still have to be deemed satisfactory at each milestone along the way before every new 60-day period would even commence–I declined to take the assignment.

Ever since–when I see Novartis mentioned in the news, whether it’s about a patent dispute in India over the medicine Gleevec, or the ProPublica story by Theodoric Meyer I tweeted about above, with a lawsuit alleging that Novartis paid “kickbacks—cash, meals and favors to relatives” of doctors who then improperly prescribed the company’s drugs to their patients–I feel relief, satisfaction, and a small measure of pleasure, knowing that I didn’t end up doing any work for this disreputable pharmaceutical giant.

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