Blog Post
Manifesto Destiny: Melting Watch Press debuts with Beats-inspired poetry anthology
by christopherporter
Cousins Joe Provenzano and Mike Benoit aren't short on proclamations. Their new Ann Arbor-based Melting Watch Press was inspired by a shared love of the Transcendentalists -- particularly Walt Whitman -- and the Beats, and the duo aren't afraid to claim their place in that lineage.
“We really consider ourselves to be part of their tradition,” says Provenzano. The cousins believe in "the idea of writing things that we’re actually thinking, and taking ourselves away from academic pseudo-poetry and (the) shielding of ourselves and opening our hearts to the page.”
Melting Watch Press' first salvo against "academic pseudo-poetry" is Chattering of the Subconscious Toybox: A Radical Anthology of Emerging New Poets, an anthology featuring Provenzano, Benoit, and their friend Jake Camaj.
Provenzano and Benoit are disenchanted with what they feel is an “MFA takeover” of literature and they hope to bring honest, Beat-inspired poetry back to the cultural consciousness and especially to introduce it to today’s youth through their work and publications.
“Our generation has quite a lot of data thrown at them with the advent of social media and the internet,” says Provenzano. “Pop culture today doesn’t really emphasize the importance of literary arts. Music is something that is always loud and it’s easy for people to hop onto music because you don’t have to do any extra work to have a song thrown at you. It’s different than actually having to sit down and read a book. Mike and I sincerely believe that when you create a personal intimacy with the arts it can do something for your life that nothing else can do.”
Both Provenzano and Benoit are millennials themselves, so they’ve experienced firsthand the distractions that today’s culture delivers. “Youth today are so bombarded by media that it’s almost difficult for [them] to form their own perspective,” says Benoit. “Something that we want to do is to encourage people to observe everything and then filter it through yourself. Find what works for you. It’s alright to have your own perspective, and it’s alright to have your own opinion, and to act on that opinion and not be afraid of it.”
Since the publication of Chattering of the Subconscious Toybox, both Benoit and Provenzano have been hard at work at their next publications. They each plan to release a book of prose around the same time, with a collection by Camaj to follow afterward. They view Chattering as a sort of “sampler package” of their work.
“This is what’s happening in contemporary writing and this is where contemporary writing can go,” says Provenzano. “We really plan to take this to the national level and as far as we can, ad infinitum, because we really believe in what we’re doing and we believe that there are other people who are going to find consanguineous relation to our efforts and want to be a part of this.”
Along with working on their own collections, the two are cultivating other writers and accepting submissions for Melting Watch Press. The duo is also dedicated to republishing works by some of their literary heroes. First up is a republication of the 1855 original edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Provenzano and Benoit feel indebted to poets like Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Beats because they lived their art, and they idolize Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who in 1955 also created his own publishing house in association with his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
“These people gave their lives for art to enrich the lives of everybody (else),” says Provenzano. “Not everybody has to be like Mike and myself and become an artist and want to change the world. But art has the potential to light people up like it’s lit us up. Like Emerson said, ‘To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived -- this is to have succeeded.’ We want to make everyone’s lives better by doing what we do best and that’s giving our lives to the arts.”
Elizabeth Pearce is a Library Technician at the Ann Arbor District Library.
Click here to order "Chattering of the Subconscious Toybox: A Radical Anthology of Emerging New Poets."
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #642 & #643
by christopherporter
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #642
The Garden of Small Beginnings * by Abbi Waxman is a story of loss but also the joy of second chances.
It has been three years since Lilian watched her husband died in a car accident 50 feet from her front door. After a breakdown and hospitalization, she is back at her job as a textbook illustrator in a small LA publishing house and making a life with her two young daughters, Annabel and Clare.
With the industry downturn, she could save the company by branching out to illustrate a new series on vegetable gardening. Having agreed to take a 6-weeks Saturday morning gardening class with the author, Edward Bloem, "(m)any life lessons are learned in the garden, and not just by Lilian."
"The plot is straightforward, but it is Waxman’s skill at characterization that lifts this novel far above being just another "widow finds love” story. Clearly an observer, Waxman has mastered the fine art of dialogue as well. Characters ring true right down to Lilian’s two daughters, who often steal the show." (Kirkus Review)
For readers who are charmed by such titles as Good Grief, Heat Wave; Lost Lake, and recent debuts like Happy People Read & Drink Coffee and Angelina's Bachelors.
Gail Honeyman's debut Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine * is a "smart, warm, uplifting" story about a young woman's journey toward wholeness.
Scarred inside and out, 29-year-old Eleanor aspires to be unremarkable and normal all her adult life. An accounting clerk at a small Glasgow graphic design firm, her lack of social skills makes her the butt of office jokes. She finds comfort in strict routines, solitude, copious amount of vodka on the weekends, and will insist to all who care to inquire that she is "completely fine".
Almost simultaneously Eleanor falls for a gorgeous, out-of-her-league bar singer and begins an almost frenzied (and hilarious) self-improvement program while striking up a tentative friendship with Raymond, the slovenly IT guy after they saved Sammy, an elderly retired postal clerk on the street. The three become the kind of friends who rescue each other from the lives of isolation, and it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
"Walking in Eleanor’s practical black Velcro shoes is delightfully amusing, her prudish observations leavened with a privately puckish humor. But readers will also be drawn in by her tragic backstory, which slowly reveals how she came to be so entirely Eleanor. Witty, charming, and heartwarming." (Booklist)
For readers of Jojo Moyes and Helen Simonson.
* = Starred review
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #643
Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death on July 18, The Jane Austen Project * by Kathleen Flynn asks: "Given the chance, what would one give up so that Jane could live?"
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, 2 time-travelers from the future arrive in 1815 London with specific goals - to find Austen's rumored unfinished novel The Watsons; and to determine the cause of her death in 1817, without altering the course of history.
Rachel Katzman, a disaster-relief physician and Liam Finucane, an actor-turned-scholar pose as Dr. William Ravenswood and his sister Mary, wealthy plantation owners just arrived from the West Indies and successfully insinuate themselves into the lives of the Austen clan by charming Henry, Jane's favorite brother.
As Rachel's friendship with Jane deepens over the course of the year and the unpublished manuscript is within reach, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact, exactly as they found it. With the portal to return to the future about to close, Rachel must make difficult choices - including whether she would allow Jane's fatal illness to remain undiagnosed.
(Debut novelist and New York Times editor) "Flynn skillfully delves into the later years of Austen's life in a way that is sure to please admirers of the 19th-century novelist, as well as providing a fascinating dollop of plot invention and a heartbreaking romance between the two protagonists." ~ Library Journal
Fans of time-travel and romance would enjoy the series by Julie McElwain that opens with A Murder in Time; and All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai.
Fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012) would find much to like in The Space Between the Stars, Anne Corlett's debut.
Veterinarian researcher Jamie Allenby survives a virus that nearly wiped out humanity throughout the galaxy to find herself alone on a distant planet called Soltaire. Jamie soon meets up with other survivors, and together this ragtag group is rescued by a passing ship, heading back to Earth, and to Daniel, her estranged boyfriend whom Jamie believes, might have survived the virus as well.
However, once back on Earth, some of the fellow survivors reveal themselves to be not as they seem. Secret agendas and deadly intents if unconstrained will have serious repercussions for the future of mankind. Jamie must take matters into her own hand.
"Corlett offers a thoughtful examination of how individuals find meaning and fulfillment in the face of an apocalyptic event then wraps up with a thrilleresque ending." ~ Boolist
* = starred review
Related:
➥ Fabulous Fiction Firsts archive
Blog Post
Elly Griffiths' "The Chalk Pit" continues one mystery's best current series
by christopherporter
Secret societies, cannibalism, and ritual killings? Bones found in an old chalk-mining pit? Labyrinths and tunnels and a forensic specialist who keeps finding herself embroiled in murders?
Where do we find all of this?
Deep inside The Chalk Pit, the ninth book in the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths.
The novel finds our intrepid forensic archeologist far beneath the streets of Norwich, England. The seed for the setting of this book was planted when Griffiths gave a talk at an independent bookstore in Norwich.
“The manager happened to mention that there was a tunnel under the store and asked if I wanted to see it,” Griffiths says. “(The chalk tunnel) was low-ceilinged and damp and led off into darkness. (My research) found that you can walk the length of Norwich underground because there are so many old chalk-mining tunnels, crypts, and undercrofts.”
Blog Post
Red Scare: Glenn Frankel's "High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic"
by christopherporter
Each year we hear about how political the Oscars are, but this may have never been truer than in 1953 when High Noon scored big with critics and moviegoers the year before (and earned seven nominations), but also found itself in the crosshairs of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“There was a campaign to make sure (High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman) didn’t win, because that would be too embarrassing,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel, who just published High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic.
Frankel will talk about his latest book at the Westgate branch of the Ann Arbor District Library on Friday, June 23 from 7-8:30 pm.
High Noon, now considered an American classic, starred Gary Cooper as an Old West marshal (William Kane) who’s about to retire and leave town with his new, young, Quaker bride, Amy (Grace Kelly, in one of her first movie roles), when he receives news that a killer he caught and sent to prison has been released and is on his way back to town, on the noon train, to seek revenge, alongside three of his henchmen. Kane tries to form a posse, but as he makes his way around town, he quickly realizes that, despite his service to the town, no one is willing to stand with him.
There were some similarities between the initial four-page treatment for High Noon and a published short story by John Cunningham called “The Tin Star,” so Foreman purchased the story’s film rights. But when Foreman received a subpoena to appear before HUAC during the month-long filming of High Noon in fall 1951, the character of Will Kane secretly, but pointedly, evolved to become a fictional stand-in for Foreman, who found himself being abandoned by friends and colleagues in Hollywood.
“(Foreman) was careful not to tell anybody that or it would have killed the movie,” said Frankel. “But a couple sets of people figured it out. You had right-wingers like John Wayne and columnist Hedda Hopper doing the math of, Foreman was once a member of the Communist Party, he wrote High Noon, therefore, High Noon is a communist movie. That was their sense of how the world worked.”
But Foreman, who self-exiled to London after refusing to provide names to HUAC, wrote a letter to New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther, who’d already sung High Noon’s praises in a review. “That next weekend, there was a Sunday weekend piece talking about the movie, saying that courage is what it was really about and that people in Hollywood could learn a lot about courage from watching High Noon,” said Frankel.
As is often true with McCarthy Era tales, a friendship came apart as High Noon was coming together and the rift was never mended. Producer Stanley Kramer built a highly successful independent production company, working alongside Foreman, whom he’d gotten to know while working in the Army’s film unit during World War II. High Noon, as it happens, was to be Kramer’s last indie production before jumping into a big contract with Columbia Pictures -- one last, quick, cheap hurrah -- but Foreman’s refusal to cooperate with HUAC caused a rift between him and Kramer. Even so, Kramer couldn’t kick Foreman off High Noon while it was still in production, for financing reasons.
The screenwriter emigrated to England before the movie’s release in theaters and the two men reportedly never spoke again.
“Kramer’s people didn’t want (Foreman) to win, and (director Fred) Zinnemann didn’t win,” said Frankel of the 1953 Oscar race. “Cooper won best actor, but he was part of Hollywood’s royalty, and a conservative, so even though he was an ally of Foreman’s, they were happy to support him. It also won best theme, best score, and best editing. So it won the safe ones, the easy ones. It didn’t win the ones that would have validated the movie. And that’s no accident. There was a lot of quiet campaigning going on.”
High Noon was distinctive for being a western that broke genre rules. It didn’t have beautiful landscapes, but instead had a gritty, documentary feel; there’s little action, until the iconic gunfight at the end; a woman saved her man, instead of vice versa; and at a time when most movies were in color, Zinnemann chose to film in black and white. Plus, before the movie even appeared in theaters, its opening theme, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was a huge hit.
So it had an awful lot going for it; but Foreman -- who, after two Oscar nominations for other films, had drawn more attention to himself -- had been part of the Communist Party more than a decade earlier, and that was enough to temper its success.
“The real attraction of the Communist Party, and the left in general, was during the Depression when things were breaking down and people were looking for answers,” said Frankel. “After the war, things began to change. The war ends, the Soviets develop the atomic bomb, a nuclear arms race gets underway, there’s brutal fighting in Korea -- by 1951, it’s hard to overestimate how much anxiety and fear of communism there was, and people in power exploited that.”
Frankel places some of the blame for HUAC’s successful, sustained reign of fear at journalists’ feet, but he also notes that politicians used what they’d gleaned about journalism’s conventions, parameters, and timelines to put their cause in an advantageous position.
This still occurs, of course. And in an interesting twist, conservative talking head Ann Coulter recently compared Donald Trump to none other than Cooper in High Noon.
“Works of pop culture can be used and abused in all kinds of ways,” said Frankel. “But it’s helpful to know where a work comes from. … I like writing about pop cultural history and its relationship to the larger culture, because I think we learn things from that, and it’s interesting to see how they interact.”
Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.
Glenn Frankel will talk about "High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic" at the Westgate branch of the Ann Arbor District Library on Friday, June 23 from 7-8:30 pm.
Blog Post
Hunger for Life: Roxane Gay at Hill Auditorium
by christopherporter
Roxane Gay is an endurance performer.
She is a professor, essayist, fiction writer, and cultural critic. Any pair of these things could fill or even overwhelm a professional life, but she does not stop there. As a person who at times fetishizes achievement, I am awed by the sheer quantity of pages that she has loosed into the world. And that is before we consider her Twitter presence or the volume of reading that she does, evidenced by the book giveaways that appear on her Tumblr from time-to-time.
I know that Gay’s smarts help fuel her accomplishments as do her talents, but when I think about her -- like, big picture her -- I just think, "Damn, she works hard. She hustles."
At Gay’s reading for her new book, Hunger, on June 16, I took a seat toward the back of Hill Auditorium and watched the audience file in. I've never been someone who needs an excuse to gawk at and examine other women’s bodies, and I was wondering who would join me to hear excerpts from Hunger, which tells the story of Roxane Gay’s body.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #640 & #641
by christopherporter
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #640
Winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 1988 and available for the first time in English (translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover), Hadriana in All My Dreams * * * by Rene Depestre, combines magic, fantasy, eroticism, and delirious humor to explore universal questions of race and sexuality.
Blog Post
Unicorning: Samantha Irby & Scaachi Koul at Literati
by christopherporter
Unicorn should be a verb. As a verb, this would be what you do when you project all sorts of magical qualities onto somebody else.
But I recently read an essay called “Samantha Irby Needs to Talk About Some Sh*t” and I was hooked. We’re talking immediate Google stalking. That’s how I knew that I could -- despite the title of her new release, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life -- meet her in real life.
On Tuesday, June 13, Irby and Buzzfeed culture writer/essayist Scaachi Koul appeared at Literati where they read selections from their books and answered questions to a full house.
I really, really tried not to unicorn them.
I was a bit tardy to the reading, but the best part of running late and standing in the back is you get to unabashedly check out others in attendance. Plus, diversity is perhaps best observed from the back. I examined a long pair of French braids resting on a light brown back. I admired about a half-dozen different heads of Afro hair in a variety of styles. Body shapes suggested women of all ages, and I saw way more skin tones on this sea of necks than the Crayola multicultural set ever came up with. There were even some men in the audience, their body language as attentive as the women who outnumbered them.
The disadvantage to being in the back, beyond the obvious, is that laughter travels away from you; it’s more difficult to enjoy communal laughter from behind.
While I had purchased both We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, I hadn’t made it all the way through the books. But I did arrive in time to hear Irby tell a tale that I did read where she describes having to relieve herself on the side of the road.
Not number 1, number 2.
It was wintertime. It was not a desolate road.
Yes, I had read this chapter, but looking directly at the person who lived through this thing that made you sweat sympathetically and hearing the words come from her mouth is an entirely different experience.
Koul shared also shared a visceral, body-related story. In the space of a chapter, she scratched up memories of those days when one hopes to remake herself, become reborn, those days when something like a T-shirt or a skirt promises to be the thing that changes your life. In this tale involving a dressing room, a skirt, scissors, and the thong that was maimed in the process, Koul brought the audience face-to-face with stone cold humiliation.
As I watched the golden-hour sun stream into the window that framed these women, I tried to keep the unicorning at bay. But resisting this urge is a tall order when you’re looking at two bespectacled, brown-skinned, smart, funny women who probably have as much trouble as you do finding makeup that looks right on their skin.
Both women touched on the idea of unicorning. Koul, in particular, talked about the tension that comes with writing nonfiction essays about one’s life. In addition to people asking her overly personal questions about her upcoming wedding arrangements in response to an Instagram post, she experiences emotional overflow from her readers. “Brown girls come up to me and just weep. They show up and they just fucking bawl,” Koul said. On representation, she continued, “I wish there was more stuff so they had the opportunity to dislike me more.”
Irby touched on this idea when she told the audience that her book and Roxane Gay’s Hunger were to share a release date at one point. “Naw, man,” she said. “Two fat black girls’ books can’t come out on the same day.” She then talked about how she and Roxane Gay are sometimes confused for each other despite the marked differences in their work. If turning two very different people into one isn’t unicorning -- letting a person stand in for an abstract idea -- I don’t know what is.
When asked what their recent reads were, they gave the audience a few books to explore. After they recommended each other’s books, Koul mentioned American War by Omar El Akkad. Irby mentioned The Mothers by Brit Bennett, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and the forthcoming Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.
In addition to recommendations, these women served up many laughs. “People ask me why I’m angry,” Koul said. “Is it men who ask you that?” Irby replied. “Of course,” Koul emphatically said, “it’s men who ask me that!” Another zinger came from Koul on the topic of Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau: “He’s super hot, but he’s useless.”
They weren’t laughing, however, when asked about the path to publishing their books. Irby had 40,000 words cut from her manuscript and Koul had 30,000 words cut from hers. But as the audience tensed up at imagining this challenge, Irby and Kohl joked that it just meant they had to come up with thousands of new words.
This example illustrated how challenging the writing life can be and how much work goes into these books that were years in the making. It also reminded us how lucky we were to share an evening with these remarkable unicorns. I mean, writers.
Sherlonya Turner is the manager of the Youth & Adult: Services & Collections Department at the Ann Arbor District Library. She can be found diving head-first into all sorts of projects over at sherlonya.net.
Blog Post
Clutch of Grit: Keith Lesmeister reads from "We Could Have Been Happy Here" at Literati
by christopherporter
Keith Lesmeister's debut collection, We Could Have Been Happy Here, features a "gritty, emotionally sensitive clutch” of short stories, according to Kirkus Reviews.
That description that can be applied to a lot of Midwestern writers and Lesmeister fits the bill. He grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and currently lives in Decorah, which he describes as “much smaller -- a rural community located in the far northeast corner of the state.” The author's life experiences hum in the background of this collection, but the stories aren't autobiographical. What he learned from diving deeply into Iowa, he said, is how to better connect with people whose experiences are immensely different than his: “I spent a lot of time with characters whose lives are unlike mine in many ways -- I’ve never driven around with my suicidal grandmother; I’ve never experienced a deployed parent; I’ve never felt betrayed by a twin brother; and so on and so forth.”
On June 16, Lesmeister reads from We Could Have Been Happy Here at Literati. We chatted with him about Iowa, what makes a good short story, and more. Spoiler: Lesmeister’s so excited to read in Ann Arbor that he might even bake a cake.
Q: You said you learned how to better connect with people who are very different from you, with characters whose lives are not similar to yours. Writers are often encouraged to write about what they know, but your collection succeeds in bucking this advice. How did you approach "connecting" with these characters?
A: You're right: most writers starting out are given the advice to write what they know. I was given the opposite advice, which was to explore characters and situations vastly different from my own. And your question is spot on: How does one connect with a character who is unlike him/herself? I think the answer lies somewhere in the search for our shared sense of humanity: What do we fear? Love? Despise? What are our ambitions? Wants? Desires? What are our insecurities? Vulnerabilities? These answers, for each character, emerge after spending time on the page with each. In other words, putting those characters in impossible situations to see what they might do or say. One of the delights of being a fiction writer is that process of discovery and surprise. There's no greater surprise than when a character starts to act out on his/her own, independent of what I might want him/her to do or say.
Q: Since last year’s election result, there has been an elevated interest in understanding the nature of the Heartland/Rustbelt/Midwest and the motivations of the residents who populate these areas. Obviously, it’s challenging and perhaps impossible to describe such a large place with lots of people broadly. What's your take on this question?
A: I’m not sure how to answer this, so let me share a brief anecdote. I was talking with a few guys prior to Iowa’s first in the nation caucus. This was January 2015. The men were from a small neighboring town to Decorah and worked in the trades -- plumbers, electricians. We got talking politics and I asked them -- after a few beers -- if they were planning to caucus, and if so, for whom? They all answered, “Bernie, he’s the best candidate.” I said, “Sure, great, but what if he doesn’t win the nomination, what then?” And they all answered in unison, “Trump, no question.” Somewhere in their answer, I think, is a deep distrust for traditional politicians and a yearning for someone who speaks to the interest of blue-collar workers. The same thing happened in 2008 and 2012: Iowa voted for Obama, a less than traditional candidate in that he had very little political experience (nationally), but he spoke to the concerns of working-class families in a believable, authentic way. I think blue-collar Midwesterners yearn for that support from their candidates.
Q: Related, the Kirkus reviewer noted: “Lesmeister's vision of Iowa isn't exclusively somber, though. He can bring wit and lightness to these dirty-realist tales.” This balance seems somehow key to a good short story to me. What makes a good short story in your view?
A: I think it starts and ends with fidelity to characters. Which is to say, allowing the characters to be fully him or herself without authorial heavy-handedness. Abdicating this control is difficult, to be sure, but necessary for any amount of surprise and discovery in the narrative, which, for me, are the signs of a successful story -- surprise and discovery.
Q: You reside in the Midwest and your stories take place in the Midwest. Are there Midwestern literary voices that have resonated with you or have provided inspiration for your writing?
A: The last few books I’ve read, though well after putting this collection together, are Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief and Marilynne Robinon’s Home and Lila. These three books haven’t shaped this collection, necessarily, though I would love it if any amount of their respective genius (Smiley’s and Robinson’s) influenced my future work.
Q: You’re reading with Alexander Weinstein and Marlin M. Jenkins. Do you see thematic connections here?
A: I'm honored -- and thrilled -- to be reading with Alexander Weinstein and Marlin M. Jenkins, wonderful writers whose work focuses on the immediacy of our society's needs. For instance, climate change, politics, and the dismal failures of unfettered capitalism and its extreme impact on those living on the economic fringe, certainly, but also middle and working-class families. Each author explores current events in ways unique and lyrical, timely and urgent, and while I confess to not being as adept at writing about those same issues, as Alexander and Marlin, I do hope my work brushes up against those same ideas. In this way, I think readers and attendees of our event, will see a diverse set of readings which ask similar questions, such as: How do we, as writers, respond to the growing needs of a polarized community?
Anna Prushinskaya is a writer in Ann Arbor. Her collection of essays, A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, is forthcoming from MG Press in fall 2017.
See Keith Lesmeister at Literati, 124 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor, on June 15 at 7 pm. He will be joined in reading by Markin Jenkins, a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers' Program, and Alexander Weinstein, author of "Children of the New World."
Blog Post
Cozy Up: Meg Macy’s "Bearly Departed" at Nicola's
by christopherporter
Most everyone had a favorite teddy bear growing up; some of us maybe had 10 or 12 or 15 of them. And how many of us imagined what it would be like to work in a teddy bear factory?
Silver Hollow resident Sasha Silverman, the main character in Meg Macy’s Bearly Departed, actually does work in a teddy bear factory, but it's not all fuzzy snuggles on the assembly line. She also must solve the mystery of who killed the villainous sales rep and left his body in her factory.
Local readers will note that Sasha’s teddy bear factory has some similarities to the one formerly located in nearby Chelsea. “I got my first bear (a Paddington) from Harrods, shortly before my daughter was born. That started my collection," Macy said. "I have all kinds of stuffed bears, Beanie baby bears, figurines, plaques, embroidered bear pictures, and a silky Chelsea bear.”
Blog Post
Back to the Future: Kevin Smokler, "Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies"
by christopherporter
The 2010 Academy Awards telecast devoted a nearly seven-minute chunk of airtime to commemorating the life and work of John Hughes, a director/writer/producer who never received an Oscar nod in his life.
Kevin Smokler's recent book, Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies, explains why those Hughes films stand the test of time. But his interests run much wider than just Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Throughout his enjoyable survey of the decade, Smokler persuasively argues that, during this time, setting began to matter more to teen films than ever before.
Smokler will return to his original hometown of Ann Arbor on Monday, June 12, at 7 pm for an appearance at Literati. I spoke with the author about Reagan-era high-points as varied as Risky Business, The Lost Boys, and Back to the Future, as well as the Hughes canon.
Q: How did the concept of Brat Pack America come to you?
A: I had been wanting to do a book about '80s teen movies for a long time because I always saw them as a group, and not just because of John Hughes or because of the label Brat Pack that was unceremoniously given to this group of young actors. I had been an early teenager at that time and had recognized that there was a bumper crop of movies made about people my age and slightly older than me. I'm not the first person to come to that realization. The movies have been written about in one way or another several times, and several times admirably. I didn't quite see what I had to add to that story. So since that's usually where I begin most of my books -- having an idea off in the distance like the green light at the end of the dock -- I just sort of wander toward it and hope when I get there the path I've taken is clear, and I have something to report back once I get there.
In this particular case, I spent a lot of time with a stack of DVDs, and what I noticed is I kept circling back to this memory I had of my father, who had grown up in Detroit and really liked telling me and my brothers about all of the things that came from the middle of the country. One of those things was John Hughes; he was enormously proud of the fact that John Hughes was a Michigander and made all of his movies proudly about the Midwest. I remembered thinking to myself, you say "Chicago filmmaker" and you could say William Friedkin or John McNaughton, or a hundred other people, but in my mind, the first name that comes forth is John Hughes. So I started thinking about that and thinking about the movies at that time that were self-consciously about the places where they happened. One night, late into the night and three iced coffees to the wind, I scrawled "Brat Pack America" down on a pad and fell asleep. That's where the idea started from. I've always been an Americana buff, so I'm always trying to work the word "America" into the things I do and actually, in this case, it made sense.
Q: Your examination of the early hip-hop movies being specifically about New York was eye-opening.
A: I'm sort of dubious of culture writing that assumes a part is actually a whole so I think there are books that say, "I'm going to write about the indie-rock movement of the 1980s," and they say so up front, and they set their boundaries by that, and that's what they stick to. Then there are books that say the same thing but say, "I'm going to write about the music of the 1980s," but they only write about white guys with guitars. That's just sloppy at best, and at worst it's making a lot of assumptions. I was very careful not to assume an '80s teen movie meant John Hughes and his closest disciples because I think the category is much richer than that. When I went looking, there were these two strands that popped out at me, the doppelgangers of the John Hughes movies -- the dystopian dark comedies like Repo Man and Heathers, and also the early generation of hip-hop movies, because hip-hop was a young artform perpetuated by young people.
Q: One of my earliest moviegoing memories was walking down to the local one-screen theater in my hometown and being denied a ticket to see The Breakfast Club because it was rated R. It was the only Hughes film to have an R rating, and I was curious if you have any thoughts about that.
A: In my research about Hughes, and in talking to his family, it didn't come up all that often, that ratings were an issue. Hughes largely made movies with one or two studios. For someone who was a savvy businessman, he didn't have a whole lot of patience for or interest in the business of making movies. I think he dealt with studios as little as possible, and the agreement he had with them, even if it was unspoken, was largely that he would bring in something on time and on budget that they can use and make money on without spending a ton on marketing. He delivered on that promise over and over again.
I think when he wanted to do something that was more challenging, like The Breakfast Club, he, in fact, wanted to make The Breakfast Club first, but the studio sort of said, "How exciting is seeing a bunch of teenagers sit around all day going to be?" So he very smartly chose to make Sixteen Candles first, which is a lot more high concept and whose appeal is more straightforward. Not that Sixteen Candles was such a box office success, it wasn't, but it was proof of concept that Hughes was a self-sustaining unit who could do things his way and good actors wanted to work with him.
I think they [the studios] sort of counted on him to deliver the goods affordably. I don't think they worried too much about ratings. Maybe they just assumed that if the R rating was prohibitive for teenagers seeing The Breakfast Club in the theater it would bounce back on video, and it turned out it was a box office hit anyway.
Q: Have you rewatched these movies with kids?
A: I don't have kids, but I've watched them other people's kids, which has been pretty interesting. I watched both and Back to the Future with a friend's young teenagers, and the two things that jumped out at them are that the kind of bullying you see in The Karate Kid isn't done much anymore, at least not in their San Francisco public school world. It's more of the spreading vicious rumors on social media kind of bullying. The thing I have to say about Back to the Future is, the chronology was very confusing for them because to them 1985 is the past, and 1955 is the way past, so most of the time travel jokes were lost on them, and the social mores surrounding parents and kids were lost on them, too. I think they mostly thought it was funny, and the DeLorean was cool.
Q: I have two teenage girls, and I know the ones that speak to them as closely as they did to me at that age are The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller, both of those really work for them still.
A: I didn't notice this until I read some biographies, but John Hughes always operated from sort of an archetypal, slightly mythic, instead of grounded in realism, approach. He clearly makes use of lots of Hollywood archetypes. What is Sixteen Candles if not a Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie? What is Ferris Bueller if not On the Town but with high school students instead of sailors? I think the fact that those movies hold up is in part due to plots and tropes that have been with us since the beginning of moviemaking. Another part of it is due to John Hughes skill at being specific and archetypal and relatable and mythical at the same time.
Q: When you mentioned the time frame in Back to the Future it made me think of one of my favorite passages in your book about how Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders is a film shot in the '80s, set in the '60s, with the iconography of the '50s, from a master of the '70s.
A: And filmed like it was set in the '30s, like it was in CinemaScope like Gone With the Wind. I think a lot of that had to do with how young S.E. Hinton was when she wrote it. She was writing a book about her peers, it was published when she was 20, so she was doing on-the-ground reporting. It was not nostalgic when it was written. This may be me being elitist, I think because the book was set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and not in some major urban area, I think the iconography is not the leading edge. There is a reference in some of S.E. Hinton's later work to hippie kids, but even though The Outsiders was published the same year as the Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper, it feels like it comes from an earlier era. It was coincidence that the movie was made in the '80s, 15 years after it was published. That's when it came to Coppola's attention. He had kids just the right age to read the book in school. It did dovetail nicely with the fascination with cars with tailfins, and leather jackets and greasers that was part of the early '80s culture.
Q: After revisiting all of these movies doing research for the book, I'm curious what movie were you surprised by how your feelings toward it changed, either positively or negatively, since you saw them as a teenager.
A: The chapter on horror movies didn't make the final manuscript of this book. As a kid, I was too scared to go see horror movies, so I was shocked at how great a movie Halloween is. I just thought it would be trashy and cynical and gross, and I think Halloween is a masterstroke of modest budget filmmaking, of making something out of nothing. I think Halloween is genius. I remember being crazy about The Lost Boys, and I think The Lost Boys is now your basic teen vampire movies. It's only 90 minutes, so by the time it gets ridiculous, it's over. But I think it looks great; that's mostly Joel Schumacher's doing, and it makes spectacular use of Santa Cruz. There's been a dozen movies shot since in Sana Cruz and they all work to varying degrees, but when you go to the Yelp reviews of the Santa Cruz boardwalk nobody mentions Killer Klowns From Outer Space or Riding Giants or any of those movies; they all mention The Lost Boys. I don't think The Lost Boys is a great movie; it's a greatly produced movie. I think it looks great, and the use of setting is fantastic.
I think it really would have helped had I seen Gremlins at that age. I didn't. In retrospect, there's not much to it. It's fun, it's well cast, it's naively racist, which is annoying. Many Steven Spielberg acolytes at the time were playing with this vaguely racist idea of a poor helpless group of white kids menaced by a mean outside non-white force. Gremlins is an example of that; Adventures in Babysitting is an example of that. I don't think those movies were intentionally prejudiced, but they were playing with a lot of notions that seemed at best dated and at worst terribly closed-minded. I don't think those movies wear very well. And I'm not the kind of person who opposes showing kids movies with outdated ideas; it's a good excuse to have an honest conversation with them. But I think if your kid is watching Sixteen Candles and guffawing at Jake Ryan's date rape joke, that's a teachable moment.
Q: What's the best movie that you couldn't work into the book that you really wanted to?
A: Risky Business. I had a whole chapter that was fun to write, I hated to let it go, about Risky Business, Adventures in Babysitting, Midnight Madness, the whole kids-let-loose-on-the-big-city-at-night kind of movie. It was too similar to other chapters and the manuscript was too long and it had to go. Risky Business is one of my absolute favorite movies. I think that movie is fun to watch, it's a masterstroke of satire of '80s youth and ambition. It's sexy as hell. It's one of the most inspired scores in movie history.
Q: One of the most intriguing concepts of your book is that place matters. You really get at how these movies defined where they took place, and that was a necessary element to the overall story. I'm curious, post-Brat Pack America, what films do you see are worthy of a spot on that map?
A: I don't think they use place in exactly the same way. If we're just talking about teen movies, a movie like (2015's) Dope is a really interesting reconfiguring of the map of Los Angeles where working class black and Latino kids live. If Dope was made a decade before, it would take place in South Central. Dope, made in 2015, takes place in Inglewood. Very self-consciously Inglewood. That's not just the interest of the director -- who set his film The Wood (1999) there as well -- but also showing that sort of archetypal working-class black and Latino teenage story has moved there geographically. I think that's really interesting.
I think a movie like (2012's) The Perks of Being a Wallflower and (2015's) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which are both set in Pittsburgh, is infinitely more interesting having been set in Pittsburgh and is an exemplar of how Pittsburgh is the revitalized former rust belt city. Is it crucial those films take place in Pittsburgh? No. Does it say something interesting about what place Pittsburgh holds in our national consciousness? Yes. What other movies self-consciously takes place in Pittsburgh? The Deer Hunter. That's a totally different Pittsburgh than the one in Perks of Being a Wallflower. It says a lot about how far we've come that the last shot of Perks of Being a Wallflower is -- the music swells [David Bowie's "Heroes"] -- and they emerge from the Fort Pitt Tunnel and there they are driving into downtown Pittsburgh. If that movie was made in 1987, it would have them going the other way through the tunnel and driving away from downtown Pittsburgh.
In the '80s we were coming out of an era where moviemaking seemed like a very coastal thing and that was largely the interest of Coppola's generation of filmmakers. My argument in Brat Pack America is the opening of the image of growing up in America at this time. It becomes a life cycle event that happens all over America, not just in the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, and California. There's a democratizing effect on the stories of being young in America at that time. That becomes less necessary once A) It's done, and B) Once we have the Internet and we can travel further, faster in our minds without ever leaving home.
Perry Seibert is a movie lover, freelance writer, and founding member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Follow him on Twitter @Perrylovesfilm.
Kevin Smokler will talk "Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies" at Literati on Monday, June 12 at 7 pm. Read our previous interview with Smokler as part of a preview for the Michigan Theater's "Kids in America: '80s Teen Classics" series.