So PRODIGAL SUMMER is Barbara Kingsolver’s 5th novel, published in 2000 which I just finished reading. Kingsolver’s currently 9 novels into her career with 2022’s DEMON COPPERHEAD being the most recent.
PRODIGAL SUMMER is not as well known as BK’s first book THE BEAN TREES (1988) i.e. the debut that made her famous or THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, her 4th novel that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, sold eleventy quintuplion copies and was on every book club’s roster for a solid decade.
But ya know what? SUMMER, which is three interlocking stories of people living in the mountains of Western Virginia over one summer, is damn fine reading. It may have not been epic and sprawling, a 3 hour movie of a novel directed by Sydney Pollack or something like that. It may have not been the debut album that made us fall in love with the band. It’s a workhorse, that shows us what the artist can do on a typical day, instead when they are brand new with nothing to lose or giving us their career’s biggest flex.
AFTER HOURS is Martin Scorsese’s workhorse movie. LITTLE WOMEN is Greta Gerwigs. I think history will show that THE AGE OF PLEASURE is Janelle Monae’s workhorse album. The very good movie CRAZY STUPID LOVE is a workhorse role for Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell.
What is your favorite workhorse movie/books/album/tv show? And whose workhorse is it?
Boy, was this special. I got to complete my tour for BREAK THE FRAME: CONVERSATIONS WITH WOMEN FILMMAKERS in Chicago at the incredible neighborhood bookshop Jarvis Square Books run by the equally incredible Kate Harding alongside the legendary Mo Ryan , author of BURN IT DOWN, a huge source of inspiration for my book.
A dozen events in seven state over one summer. I am not as young or as unstoppable (if I ever was) when I first went on tour 20 years ago. But my work and I are still welcomed in, we still have friends from far away to visit (in attendance were among many, my old friend Andrew Huff who took this photo) and meet, and I can still go places all over this country and spend time with people who believe art and equality and dialogue still matter.
“We both got fired off the movie, and I put a lot on the line for casting him, and I remember thinking before we started shooting, “God, I hope I’m right about this.” It was a big leap, but really from the moment we first talked about it I could see that, as with Guinevere, that we had the same sense of humor about it, that he thought it was funny.
I had met with a number of young actors who thought Bateman was cool. No, no, no, he’s dorky. He’s absurd. I wanted an actor who could see the ridiculousness of it and could have a distance from it.”
— Director Mary Harron on her enduring faith that Christian Bale was the right actor for the protagonist Patrick Bateman. The role launched Bale’s career as an adult performer. He would win an Oscar 5 years later.
Los Angeles has its issues same as San Francisco. You don’t have to love both equally but I ain’t going in for no imaginary rivalries when our brothers and sisters down south are suffering.
As the late, great Nikki Giovanni said “We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning…we will rebuild the future…no one deserves a tragedy”
Occasionally I am asked for advice on productivity and how not to let your mistakes get in your way. I often answer with Emile Durkeim.
Who? And why?
Emile Durkeim was French Jewish sociologist in the 19th century, the father of modern criminology and a hero of mine. Why is directly relevant to our mistakes and sense of embarassment and shame around them.
Durkeim gave us two very important ideas (among many). 1) That crime is the problem of society and not just individuals 2) that problems are value neutral. They are simply there to be fixed. It does not mean our feelings about them are unimportant just that we work better if we view something we do badly (aka the problem) as say, a leaky faucet rather than a character flaw. It’s easy to fix a leaky faucet if you don’t get caught up in what having a leaky faucet says about you as a person.
Crime therefore, is not the failing of individuals but a checklist of what society can do better. And fixes are value neutral.
Therefore, not being able to say, get to work on time says nothing bad about you as a person. It is a leaky faucet ready to be tightened. So tighten it, be proud you are the person who saw the leaky faucet and fixed it. But let go of the fact that it is leaking. Faucets leak sometime. That is life not you not being able to do life.
We are proud of being Jewish, want all 101 hostages safely home, weep for their families and weep for the horror perpetrated wrongly in their name and memory by the ignorant lunatics who sit in power in Israel.
On July 18, 1984, at about 4 in the afternoon, a man carrying an Uzi and a bolt-action rifle walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro California and murdered 21 people, employees and customers, senior citizens and kids, a 6 month old child.
That McDonald’s was torn down a month later and community of San Ysidro raised the money themselves for the building of a memorial at the corner of San Ysidro Blvd + Averil Rd, where the tragedy happened. To this day, the memorial is adorned with flowers, candles of photographs of the murdered every July 18th and every Day of the Dead, so that the community may never forget them.
I have thought about this tragedy since I read about it in a Newsweek magazine at age 11. This is the most serious subject I have ever had the honor of writing about, here, in an essay called The Memory of Murder, about how we remember terrible things, how we must, and how it is never enough.
f you weren’t British or a self-defined Rude Boy (or even knew what that meant) in the years of Thatcher’s England, The Specials were more spirit than form, a band name whispered into the wind who imbued more music than they ever made themselves. The original members were only together for two records–Their self-titled debut (our topic for today) in 1979 and the follow-up “More Specials.” in 1981. The band that lasted barely 4 years and self-destructed before most of the members turned 30 would nonetheless be responsible for the bands Fun Boy Three and General Public and indirectly The Lightning Seeds and Rock N Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2023 nominees The Eurythmics. At the intersection of Ska, Punk and New Wave, the roads leading on from the Specials ended up being more special than the band themselves.
The Specials (the record) feels like an album born of youth, effortless and uneven, conviction in place of completion. It’s considered a pioneering record of early British Ska, whatever that means to you (to me it means you can’t listen to it without raising one knee then the other, an involuntary marching band of one). You’ll also hear that Britain is a racist, crumbling pile burying its young while you groove. How fun!
But it is.
At 15 songs, a good half feel curiously undone, as if keyboardist/label owner/primary songwriter Jerry Dammers yelled “good enough” before he should have. The ones we remember are gemlike in their imperfections: the understated battle cry of “A Message to you Rudy” , the metallic soar of “It’s Up to You” and my favorite “Concrete Jungle” which sounds as though The Stooges and Death met up on a Detroit street corner one Sunday morning to reinterpret Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” as a painful tale of youth violence.
As a young person near Detroit at this time, I knew The Specials from T-shirts and posters in record store windows. I didn’t know what “ska” meant until age 18 and the bands that operate in that genre I do know are American interpreters of what The Specials brought to bear. It’s my own fault for not looking more into where they came from and therefore voting without meaning to with the category’s most ignorant critics: That Ska is a spasm fad at 10-year cycles when white kids feel like dancing while wearing mid-century costumes and don’t want to learn steps like you have to in swing dancing.
I really like to dance. So any genre whose prime directive is lifting your knees in rhythm can count me in.
The Specials: Briefly here, then back again with an echo echo echo. Too young to be mods and too old to be New Wavers, they still made the nodes between those two generations of British youth culture bright and clear. Multiply that by the band punching then countering with Ska then Punk then children-of-Windrush Caribbean party music, and you have a band that made different shades of British Youth Culture feel of a common spirit and precisely the time nationalist politics sought to divide and tear.
I’m so glad I listened and made their spirits feel real.
