Aesthetic Drift #15: An Out of Mind Experience (The Excellence of Simon Vance)

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

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Audiobooks, Dale Lucas, Fifth Ward: First Watch, Simon Vance

Aesthetic Drift #15 by Dale Lucas

An Out of Mind Experience: The Excellence of Simon Vance

It’s often said that writing should be its own reward. But, here’s the thing that people forget: there is another level of satisfaction and validation attainable only when the book is printed by kind strangers at faraway publishing houses, given a gorgeous cover by someone you’ve never spoken to, and weighs down bookstore shelves from Cleveland to Brisbane. Like a child graduating college, the work can finally live in the world, independent of its creator.

Chief among these pleasures: hearing a first-rate reader narrate your audiobook.

For those of us who adore them, audiobooks are a singular magic: the modern-day equivalent of being huddled round a fire, hearing a tale told by a master dreamweaver whose only tools are his voice and the right words. (Audiobooks also make commutes and treadmill-walking a mentally vital activity). A great narrator elevates even the most forgettable material; a lousy one can sink an immortal classic.

When Orbit Books asked me who I wanted to narrate the audiobook of The Fifth Ward: First Watch, the only reader I offered was Simon Vance, winner of 14 Audie awards and 61 earphone awards, named both the ‘Voice of Choice’ by Booklist Magazine and the ‘Golden Voice’ by AudioFile Magazine.

First-Watch-cover

I didn’t mention him because I thought he’d actually be willing to read my book. But he was my absolute ideal, due in large part to his facility with voices and accents, his deadpan and sometimes hilariously understated delivery, and his glorious BBC newsreader’s accent. Even if Vance himself were not available, I simply hoped we could find someone who aspired to that level of versatility, subtlety, vocal range, and gravitas.

Some months later, Simon Vance emailed me, asking for help with my characters’ accents and the pronunciation of their names. My editor hadn’t even let me know that he was hired for the audiobook! Our brief back-and-forths over the course of several days, via email and text, gave me fascinating insight into what it meant to be a professional audiobook narrator: I was asked for pronunciation guides for almost every name spoken in the novel and was urged to cast real-world actors as my characters in order to give Vance a sense of how I imagined they should sound (and yet, in the end, none of those casting suggestions led to one note vocal impressions—Simon took my suggestions and extrapolated from them to give each of the characters a life of their own). The thrill of knowing that an actor of Mr. Vance’s caliber was about to interpret my work, to read it seriously—my tawdry, popcorny, beachy little modern-day pulp adventure—filled me with a sense of validation, a sense of success, that I’d never known before.

An artist I admire put his stamp on my work. I get to hear the Golden Voice describing a world that had hitherto only existed in my head, give life to characters who’d previously only spoken to me, and bring a world to life, filtered through his own worldview and skillset, that had, for years prior, only existed in my imagination. When I listen to that audiobook, I get to be just another listener, ready to be told a story and swept away. It’s an unusual sign that you know you’ve actually given something to the world—however modest, however humble—and that someone, somewhere thinks it’s worth a look.

Or a listen.

Photo by JP Wright.

Dale Lucas, author of The Fifth Ward: First Watch (Orbit Books) and Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights (Beating Windward Press), is a novelist, screenwriter, civil servant, and armchair historian. A graduate of the University of Central Florida and one-time teen movie critic for the Orlando Sentinel, his short stories have appeared in Samsara: The Magazine of Suffering, Horror Garage, and Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Sci Fi. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #61: Shakespeare Behind Bars [The Tempest] (2005)

27 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

61. Hank Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars [The Tempest] (2005)

In 1950’s The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling made an extended version of the argument that the liberal arts (including the experience of literature) help extend the imaginative powers of the human condition, which is necessary if society was going to thrive. This theory seems to be supported by scientific studies that suggest that the reading of literature makes people more empathetic. While this finding supports a comforting narrative that literary study is ennobling, there is significant doubt as to whether reading causes empathy to grow, or whether empaths are more likely to find their way to literature so that their reading habits correlates to their emotional outlook.

One of the reasons I resisted Shakespeare for a long time is the presumption that I should have been reading Shakespeare (because doing so would be good for me). Furthermore, the simplistic notion that Shakespeare’s stories are redemptive and that reading Shakespeare makes one good seems to overlook characters such as the bastard in King John, Iago in Othello, Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and half the characters in King Fucking Lear. Smarter is not always an ethical improvement.

I am not suggesting that Shakespeare is culturally or ethically neutral or bad—merely challenging a binary approach to the social worth of the bard.

These are some of the things that came to mind when watching this 93-minute documentary about a prison troupe called Shakespeare Behind Bars as they prepare for a performance of The Tempest.

Shakespeare Behind Bars

The setting is Luther Luckett Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in Kentucky. The film is produced by the BBC and Sundance, and features Appalachian mood music by James Wesley Semple. Imagine a smart reality television show with the gravitas of Ken Burns’s The Civil War.

What seems to strange in watching this documentary is how gentle it seems. The six prisoners we follow are guilty of heinous crimes, and with one exception they seem lucidly aware of the seriousness of their crimes. The subject of why they are in prison is not shirked.

Curt Tofte, the civilian volunteer director of the SBB program, holds these men to a high standard of understanding the psychology of these plays, and understanding how those psychologies have been in play in their own lives (though not in terms of their crimes, which he does not judge since, being in prison, they have already been formally judged). The conversations they have together about their parts, and their personal histories before prison, plus their confessional testimonials in which they discuss their crimes explicitly, reveal that these prisoners are human beings who can articulate their struggles to build a meaningful sense of selves and lives in prison.

For example, there is Sammie, who is shown delivering Henry V’s rousing Agincourt speech. Tofte taunts Sammie’s performance as a pointlessly cerebral exercise until Sammie found the urgency in the speech, after which he could find the emotional meaning of the speech.

Sammie, running lines in the yard.

Sammie is a large man, and he was bullied by his parents and sexually abused as a child. He killed his emotionally abusive girlfriend one night after she triggered him. I am deeply suspicious of the idea of acting or art as therapy, but Sammie’s ability to comprehend Shakespeare as solidly as a professional actor does imbue him with a significant emotional vocabulary.

I presume Tofte’s years of experience had built enough trust for that taunting to be positive—what he was taunting Sammie for was not being emotionally present enough in the speech.

Sammie is a successful computer programmer, and has a potentially bright future outside of prison if he is released, but he knows that his success in prison might be difficult to match as a free man, too.

In this Tempest, he plays Trinculo, the alcoholic butler who would usurp the place of the king.

Big G as Caliban, Sammie as Trinculo.

Big G is another intriguing example. In his testimonial, he explains how the prison system mentors criminals to make them into more adept criminals, but that if one is lucky, a better set of mentors can be found, like Tofte and Shakespeare. He is cast by the group as Caliban, the monster of the Island who feels like his inheritance has been denied him. Big G killed an officer in a shoot-out when he was a drug dealer in his early twenties. He explains that he initially thought that criminals should make good actors because criminals have to be good liars—but his experience as an actor showed him that good acting is far more about the truth than lying. Identifying the Caliban in himself requires depths of self-perception, and humility. (Oscar Wilde noted, in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that some readers dislike Realism because of the ugliness of the realization that we are Caliban.)

Hal as Prospero.

Hal, an older member of the group, is cast as Prospero, a man wrestling between a sense of rage and a desire for redemption.

Hal killed his wife. Hal shows himself to be incredibly sensitive, and reveals the crux of the questions I offered in the beginning of this review:

It’s taken me a long time to figure things out and to come to an understanding of who I am and why I did some of the things that I’ve done. It’s helped me to forgive myself, but some forgiveness doesn’t seem to be—to be—enough. It’s kind of—it’s kind of—it’s kind of hollow. I try to find deeper meaning—in my life and—this can’t be it. This can’t be what my life is all about, and what my actions have caused.

I am omitting several other stories because Shakespeare Behind Bars is too good to overshare before you’ve seen it. This documentary is better than most productions of The Tempest.

Shakespeare Behind Bars does not offer a definitive answer to the question of if these men are sufficiently reformed, if they can maintain their gentleness, vulnerability, and aspirational nobility in the outside world. The honesty, intelligence, and vulnerability of these men in trying to answer that question themselves is an honor to behold.

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Episode 275: A Craft Discussion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with Vanessa Blakeslee!

26 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

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Episode 275 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous Letters to a Young Poet,

plus we pay homage to Rilke’s poetry with readings by Craig Moreau,

Craig Moreau

Hyejung Kook,

SONY DSC

David Foley,

David Foley

Jason Myers,

JasonOnATrain

David McLoghlin,

David McLoghlin

and Amy Hosig.

NOTES

Go here for details on the 60th anniversary party for On the Road at the Kerouac House.

Episode 275 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #193: The Perfume of the Lady in Black

25 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Horror, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #193 by Jeff Shuster

The Perfume of the Lady in Black

It ain’t CHANEL No. 5!

We’re in week four of Giallo Month here at The Museum of Schlock. Tonight’s movie is The Perfume of the Lady in Black. And it makes no sense. I watched a Fellini movie once. It featured a large, naked Italian woman singing opera in a cemetery in the middle of the night. I think. My memory is fuzzy on that. I remember the movie not making any sense. Kind of like tonight’s movie. I got to break this up to keep my own sanity.

Perfume1

The Basics

1972’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black was directed by Francesco Barilli. It stars Mimsy Farmer as a chemist named Silvia.

Perfume3

Mimsy’s credits include movies such as Gidget Goes Hawaiian and Hot Rods to Hell. The movie also stars Maurizio Bonuglia as her boyfriend, Roberto. Oh, he starred in The Fifth Cord. I don’t remember what that movie was about. I think it involved Franco Nero dancing on some giant piano keys a la Tom Hanks in Big. I liked that movie. Whatever happened to Penny Marshall?

Witch Doctors

Silvia, the chemist, has cocktails with her boyfriend and some engineers from Africa. A Professor Andy (Jho Jenkins) points out that his ancestors used to eat their enemies. Andy goes on about how witch doctors in Africa still practice black magic, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. It’s just done in secret now. He laughs maniacally, making everyone, myself included, very uncomfortable. He then says it’s all a joke, but this does nothing to ease my suspicions.

Foppish Neighbor

Silvia has a foppish neighbor named Mr. Rossetti (Mario Scaccia) that likes to take pictures in the park on sunny afternoons. He runs out of tea frequently, knocking on her door at odd hours for a spoonful or two. He also feeds his cats ladyfingers as in fingers that belonged to a lady. Nope. I’m not talking about the sweet British biscuits. Why do the British call cookies biscuits? Maybe they don’t have biscuits in the UK. No biscuits? No biscuits! No biscuits! No biscuits! No biscuits!

The Woman in Black

She’s not really wearing a black dress. It’s black, but it’s covered with polka dots.

Perfume2

Sylva keeps seeing her everywhere. It might be the spirit of her dead mother. She also keeps seeing a young blonde girl running around that may be her as a child. She goes to a sweet shop and buys out their stock of blackberry jam. That’s the little blonde girl’s favorite.

Perfume7

Why am I watching this movie?

Cannibalism!

So Sylvia falls to her death at the end of the film. Roberto, Andy, and Mr. Rossetti bring her body to a morgue where they cut her open and start feasting on her organs. You’d think they’d at least cook them first. Other characters from the film wait in line, each dining on a little piece of Sylvia. This is a sick movie! You don’t see The Way We Were ending with a cannibalism scene. Not as I remember it, anyway.

Jeffrey Shuster 3
Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Buzzed Books #54: Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

22 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, politics

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Buzzed Books #54 by John King

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken has given me great solace over the years. I still buy and drink Ovaltine because the company sponsored his radio show from 2003-2007.

For creative people, one intriguing lesson to be drawn from Al Franken’s career is that he was a successful entertainer and writer working for SNL for fifteen years, but didn’t find his deeper calling until the mid-1990s, when he creatively changed his focus to politics. Basic professional success is not necessarily about doing one’s greatest work.

In 1996, he published Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.

I come from an academic world whose chief article of faith is in the power of critical thinking, and Al Franken delivered critical thinking with a powerful clarity that made the possibility of functional governance seem plausible even to my cynical eyes.

His follow up analytic work, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), was equally brilliant.

Franken chronicled our governmental shortcomings in the War in Iraq, including strategic errors, profiteering, and corruption. Franken trusts his readers to not be bored by looking at the facts and trying to make sense of the statistics, and what the experts have to say about them. Or he trusts himself to tell enough jokes to keep us entertained while delivering such political analysis.

In 2003, Al Franken started a radio show that put such funny, analytic effort to work five days a week. For those too young to remember, the administration of George W. Bush attempted to gaslight the populace by continuously suggesting that incompetence was better than competence, that cause bore no relationship to effect, and that those who disagreed were part of the inferior “reality based community.” I am not making that up. The show was originally called The O’Franken Factor (in order to troll Bill O’Reilly), but later assumed the more coherent nomenclature of The Al Franken Show. The goal of the program was to provide a progressive alternative to the hate-ins offered by conservative talk radio, and to defeat the re-election of President Bush. The Al Franken Show at least succeeded in the former.

From 2003 to 2007, Al Franken and his team preached to their liberal choir, something that liberals had avoided before then as if the choir should always be ignored, as if reaching out to liars to try to persuade them of your position was the only mission of public discourse. Al Franken didn’t just preach to the choir since he did often reach out to those who disagreed with him, but what his preaching to the choir did was to reveal how much different his choir was from conservative ones. There was an emphasis on analysis and understatement. One of his habits was to begin the show by reading a piece of hate mail calmly, interjecting with some commentary on the style of the letter, and then to not rebut the claims of the letter, but to move on to deeper discussion.

In 2007, Franken campaigned to become the junior senator from Minnesota, and (after a prolonged, contested recall) won the race. While I was glad for him, since I knew from listening to his shows and reading his books that he had a shrewd and deliberative mind and could likely serve well in Congress. On the other hand, I earnestly wondered if his influence on public policy and the larger national conversations about American governance and policy would have been more influential as a liberal pundit.

Over the last decade, I have not had much information with which to try to answer that question. With the publication of the memoir, Al Franken: Giant of the Senate, though, I now feel like I do.

One peculiarity of Al Franken’s latest book is that it must serve paradoxical purposes:

Tell the optimistic redemptive narrative one expects from the genre of political memoir.
Avoid the cloying, glib optimism one expects from political memoir.
Offer comparable analytic insight to what gained him a readership with Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and The Truth (With Jokes).
Be entertaining.
Be funny.

Giant of the Senate accomplishes all of the above. Franken had to somehow stay true to his Senatorial persona and his comic pundit persona. One of the great surprises of this memoir is how much insight Franken provides into how the Senate works (and doesn’t work). For example, in his conversational, yet precise style, he discusses the way that Republicans hamstrung the Affordable Care Act:

we’d anticipated … that the people signing up for insurance might be sicker than expected. So we built into the law several programs to mitigate the risks that insurers faced when they entered this new market, helping to make up for initial losses and keep them in the insurance market. One important program was called “risk corridors,” another example of Democratic messaging genius. But Republicans, led by the wilier-than-you-might-have-expected Marco Rubio, snuck a rider into a spending bill that killed off risk corridors, which meant insurance companies wound up only getting compensated for about 12 percent of what they were owed. Thus a bunch of insurers waltzed, premiums shot up, and Rubio and his friends rubbed their hands together while cackling gleefully.

The early chapters of Giant of the Senate cover his childhood through his SNL years and are meant to make this book align more comfortably with political memoirs—his origin story with some redemptive arc. One of the great things about this memoir, including these chapters, is how often Franken invites us to be critical of his indiscretions as a child, and manages to let enough real humanity enter these narratives before they become saccharine. Another thing that comes across is his real affinity and pride for his state of Minnesota.

Giant of the Senate hasn’t made me much more optimistic about the state of the US government, but it has given me solace, in letting me see the conscientious work of an intelligent person who is letting me see more clearly how the government is working. There is some comfort in that clarity.

Plus Al Franken is still damned funny.

1flip John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Pensive Prowler #10: Honing in on Audrey Horne

21 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in David Lynch, Pensive Prowler, Television

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Pensive Prowler #10 by Dmetri Kakmi

Honing in on Audrey Horne

Twin Peaks was a revolution — a revolution that spawned an icon: Audrey Horne.

Audrey Horne

Viewers who experienced Twin Peaks when it first appeared were touched for life. It was like a sickness or a revelation. They never saw the world through the same eyes again. Many couldn’t move on from the oneiric power, the dread and the uncanny weirdness. They lived the rest of their lives in Twin Peaks, population 1,201, where the streets were populated by incongruous teens and skew-wiff adults who behaved as if they walked out of a daytime soap straight into a Luis Buñuel opus.

What took place in Twin Peaks encompassed life, the comedy, the romance and the tragedy of it all. Things were slightly askew, overripe, hyper-real, like a soap opera on too much coffee and cherry pie.

The space was ideal for characters who made a virtue of being unconventional, to put it mildly. They weren’t real people so much as archetypes or symbols of themselves. Yet we cared about them and invested emotional mileage in their woes.

The triumph among them, as I say, was a schoolgirl with a penchant for pleated skirts and saddle shoes. Her name was Audrey Horne, and she did not behave like any pupil we had seen before. She was more like a screen goddess — Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner — fetishised within an inch of her life and gliding wistfully, hither and yon, like a nymph, through her father’s hotel as she sought an outlet for the youthful longing that burned a hole in her heart.

And, just like that, Audrey Horne became an icon, inseparable from Twin Peaks. With the Elizabeth Taylor hair and mole beside her left eye, Audrey Horne was a fox in vintage-inspired garb; and she tipped the scales when she dispensed with conventional job interviews and proved her worthiness for the oldest profession by tying a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue.

The pre-internet world went berserk. It was all anyone talked about for days, even as we tried to emulate her astounding and decidedly salacious feat. Who’d have thought working in a brothel could be so glamorous?

In the second season, as ratings slipped and the world found out who killed Laura Palmer, Audrey Horne handcuffed herself to a bank vault and blew up. It was a nasty, undeserved end. The collective outrage caused a ripple in the stratosphere.

We had to wait twenty-five years to find out what happened next.

Audrey Horne enters the scene exactly thirty-six minutes and four seconds into episode twelve of the return. I am not a patient man. This put all my reserves to the test.

The cut from one scene to the next is abrupt. Nothing led us to expect Audrey Horne in this episode. Other than a slight mention in the previous episode, there had been no mention of her.

When she appears, she is a good deal older — fifty-two to be precise. Gone is the fresh-face girl with the supple skin and liquid eyes. Instead, we are presented with an adult who carries a hint of the younger Audrey Horne in her bearing. She is a palimpsest, altered by time so that you can detect a suggestion of the younger Audrey in the eyes and beneath the skin of the older woman.

She stands in profile in a medium-long shot, wearing a black dress. A crimson coat is draped over an arm. The dark hair is in keeping with that of a sensible mature woman who makes an effort. The eyebrows, however, are as eloquent as quills.

The scene lasts eighteen minutes and fifty-six seconds. It’s a mini-play set in a study, complete with crackling fire and a desk crammed with paperwork. There’s a stilted quality to the acting, as if the words spoken, the gestures performed, the reaction shots, and the room the actors occupy is divorced from even the shifting reality context of Twin Peaks. The weird thing is Audrey Horne doesn’t move from her allotted spot. It’s as if she’s nailed to the floor or perhaps, in an echo of Boxing Helena, her legs have been removed to prevent escape.

When it was over, I thought, that’s it? That’s how you reintroduce an iconic character after an absence of a quarter century? A ridiculous domestic in which ugly words are exchanged and we’re expected to believe Audrey Horne is married to a bald midget? She even calls him a milquetoast. (Who uses the word ‘milquetoast’ nowadays?) It was like a dropped scene from Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I pulled myself together and called Audrey Horne on FaceTime; we’ve kept in touch over the years. Her face popped up on the screen almost immediately.

‘What did you think?’ I said, cutting to the chase. I knew she’d be watching.

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Someone should tell Lynch I’d never say milquetoast.’

Bingo!

‘And I’m not married. If I were I’d do better than that. Although having a short man for a husband has certain advantages.’ She flounced her hair and wiggled the famous eyebrows.

I was glad her sense of humour was sharp as ever.

‘Why portray you as an embittered housewife who is having an affair? It’s so…’

‘Commonplace,’ she finished. ‘And what about that house? It’s a tomb. I’m so embarrassed. People will think that’s how I live.’

‘Everyone knows you keep suites at the Great Northern.’

Audrey has been in charge of the newly refurbished Great Northern Hotel and Horne’s department store since her father Benjamin Horne died a decade ago. His brother Jerry lives in the forest with a blind hermit. Audrey also bought The Roadhouse, or The Bang Bang Bar, as it’s now known, from the Renault brothers ages ago.

‘The problem,’ Audrey said, ‘is that David can’t handle women who have their own lives. Look at the female characters in the show. Agent Tammy Preston is a freak, an empty vessel in tight skirts and stilettos. And Lucy Brennan is … let’s face it … a moron.’

‘Is she really like that?’

‘Fraid so, honey. She and Andy deserve each other.’

‘Lynch is a misogynist,’ I said, getting on my high horse. ‘Look at that embarrassing scene with Gordon Cole and the French escort.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ she said, her loyalty for the director coming through. ‘It’s too simple to say he’s a misogynist. What did that film critic say?’

‘Which film critic?’

‘Jack Bilson.’

‘Jake Wilson.’

‘Yes, him. He said, “Lynch is not afraid to tap into the place where misogyny comes from.” That’s more accurate.’

Wanting to change directions, I asked Audrey if she’s seen Shelley Johnson. It was a touchy topic.

Audrey shrugged on the screen and brought a cigarette to her mouth before saying, ‘She’s gone quiet on me.’

‘I keep hoping you two get back together again.’

Audrey and Shelley had a fling two years ago; it meant more to Audrey than it did to Shelley.

Audrey laughed. ‘You just want to see two lipstick femmes getting it on.’ Then she got serious. ‘She’s gone for good this time,’ she said, bringing the cigarette to her mouth again. ‘Shelley likes cock too much. Besides, she’s going out with that new guy… what’s his name?’

‘Red.’

The mouth twisted into a wicked little grin on the phone screen. ‘He’s cute. I would not kick him out of my bed.’

After we stopped laughing, I said, ‘I wonder why Lynch didn’t put all that in the new series. It’s more interesting than a frustrated housewife having an affair with someone called Billy.’

‘Truth is complicated,’ Audrey replied. ‘Tell it like it happened and it never seems true. Organise, simplify and it will seem truer than life.’

‘That’s what Lynch has done. Made you all seem truer than life.’

Audrey seemed tired all of a sudden; the strain showed around the eyes and mouth. ‘I’ve got to go. Someone’s coming over.’

‘One question.’

‘Shoot.’

‘How do you feel about Sherilyn Fenn, the actress who plays you?’

Audrey’s face immediately lit up. ‘She’s gorgeous. I never looked like her. Even in my younger days. But I tell you what, she’s starting to look a lot like me now.’

‘Can I write about this conversation?’

‘Go ahead. But no one will believe you.’

‘Goodnight, Audrey Horne. Glad you survived the explosion in the bank.’

dmetri-kakmi Dmetri Kakmi (Episode 158) is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. The memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. His essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals. You can find out more about him here.

Episode 274: Litlando Memoir Panel with Lisa Roney & Kristen Arnett

19 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir

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Episode 274 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Kristen Arnett & Lisa Roney at Litlando 2017, at The Gallery at Avalon Island.

NOTES

Consider donating to The Drunken Odyssey’s indiegogo fundraiser here.

Learn more about the nonprofit Page 15 here.

Follow Kristen Arnett on twitter here, or check out her website.

Check out The Florida Review here.

Go here for details on the 60th anniversary party for On the Road at the Kerouac House.

Go here for details about Functionally Literate’s next event with SJ Sindu and Kristen Arnett on September 23rd at the Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts.

Episode 274 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #192: Crimes of the Black Cat

18 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Horror, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #192 by Jeff Shuster

Crimes of the Black Cat

There should have been a clown in this one.

Okay. I’ve got a beef with whoever is streaming these Italian movies on Amazon. Stop cropping the picture. I know some of these movies were shot in scope. Knock it off! HBO does this too. Drives me crazy.

Crimes of the Black Cat

It’s a shame too because tonight’sfeature is 1972’s Crimes of the Black Cat from director Sergio Pastore, a pretty damn good Giallo. If this ever gets released on Blu-ray, the distributer can put “A pretty damn good Giallo”—Jeff Shuster, the Curator of Schlock right on the back of the box. Just send me a free copy of the Blu-ray. I like free stuff.

Crimes of the Black Cat is about a psycho serial killer who murders fashion models. How does the killer accomplish this? By dipping a feral cat’s claws in curare and setting them loose on his victims. In a way, this murderer isn’t really a murderer. It’s the black cat that’s committing these crimes, but the local police don’t see it that way. I guess getting a cat to do your murdering for you won’t absolve you of the crime.

Crimes of the Black Cat 5

Our sleuth this time around is a blind pianist by the name of Peter Oliver (Anthony Steffen), a dapper English gentleman who gets involved when he overhears a conversation in a swinging nightclub. What’s the conversation about? Can you guess? It’s about MURDER! The killer is instructing his assistant on where to deliver the cat. Peter hears the assistant walk past him and presses one of the waiters for a description. The waiter saw a woman covered in a white hood and cloak leave the club, but he couldn’t see her face.

Crimes5

Another murder happens. While being chauffeured around by his butler Burton (Umberto Raho), Peter hears the footsteps of the exact same woman from the other night. He orders Burton to tail the woman, hoping he’ll get a photo of her. Burton loses track of her. She gets on a bus. Burton races across the street, but gets stopped by a traffic cop for jaywalking.

Crimes2

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the mystery ended there? The murders stop and they never find the mysterious woman again. They never catch the murderer. Peter spends the rest of his life in self-doubt, his career as a pianist in ruins. Burton leaves his side, unable to deal with Peter’s addiction to cocaine. One day Peter befriends a neighbor kid, a gifted prodigy, another Mozart. He gives him piano lessons for free. Though his encouragement, the kid enters a piano playing tournament and wins! Cue the Rocky theme! It’s at this point Peter meets the kid’s mother, the same woman who committed those cat murders so many years ago! Duh duh duuuuuuuuuuuh!

Okay. That’s not how this movie ends. I think Peter uses his deduction skills a little too well, spooking the actual killer. At gunpoint, he’s driven to a bottle making plant. We watch as Peter maneuvers around trap after trap, his walking cane his only guide. The whole scene is quite chilling, a reminder why I take risks and watch obscure Italian Giallo movies on Amazon Prime.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Episode 273: Jason Croft!

12 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode

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Episode 273 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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On this week’s show, I catch up with Jason Croft about the continuing evolution of pin up and burly-q culture, Bunny Yeager’s legacy, the awesomeness of Medusirena, writing for pulp magazines, the joys and struggles of editorship, and the 10th anniversary of Bachelor Pad Magazine, where some of my work has been published.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

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NOTES

If you can contribute to my indiegogo fundraiser, please go here.

On Sunday, August 13th at 3 PM, join me and the other authors of Other Orlandos to celebrate its book launch!

Other Orlandos

Episode 273 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #191: Black Belly of the Tarantula

11 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #191 by Jeff Shuster

Black Belly of the Tarantula

Another score by Morricone? He’s the James Patterson of film composers!

Did any of you ever watch The Wonder Years, that stupid Jean Shepherd wannabe reminiscence show about three kids growing up in the 1960s, a time of turbulent change. There was the everyboy, Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage), girl next store, Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar), and dorkus malorkus, Paul Pfeiffer (Marilyn Manson). There was one episode where Kevin Arnold befriended some weirdo named Margaret Farquhar only to throw her to the mercy of their cruel middle school classmates at his earliest convenience. Before that happens, Margaret told Kevin a story about how the tarantula species got its name, something to do with them being named after a dance. Fascinating. Rolling Stone ranks The Wonder Years as the 63^rdgreatest TV show of all time so I guess that would make it the winning loser.

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Speaking of tarantulas, this week’s movie is called The Black Belly of the Tarantula, a 1971 giallo film from director Paolo Cavara. Get this: the killer in this movie sneaks up behind women, sticks them with a needle dabbed in wasp venom, temporarily paralyzing them. He then proceeds to carve them up with a knife while they’re conscious of what’s happening to them, but unable to move. That’s pretty sick! I mean, come one. We learn later that it’s a sexual thing for the killer, driven by the fact that his wife ridiculed him over his impotence.

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That is sufficiently disturbing. This time around, the police are actually trying to solve the case! I think the serial killer’s first victim was smuggling cocaine so that piqued their interest. Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is leading the investigation, a world-weary cop with a young wife named Laura (Claudine Auger) who wants to sell the old furniture in their apartment so they can buy new furniture. There’s a hilarious scene where the furniture movers show up right as she’s about to serve dinner. If the movers take the furniture away, she and her husband will have nothing to sleep on that night. Laura tells the movers her husband is a detective and they’d better come back the next day to pick up the furniture. The movers acquiesce to her demands. Mr. and Mrs. Tellini sit down to a tasty roast chicken dinner.

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But yeah, there’s a killer on loose. Again, we have a killer wearing a black trench coat, fedora, and latex gloves instead of black ones. You know, if a guy walks around in a black trench coat, fedora, latex gloves, and an optional tarp over his face, he still may not be a serial killer. Maybe it’s just a fashion statement. Maybe that sharp knife in my front pocket is for scraping the gum off of trees in the park. Uhhh…I’m getting off track again. What’s left?

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There’s an awesome 70s rooftop chase scene where the detectives are chasing after a suspect. Someone falls to his death. Detective Tellini lays a beat down on the killer at the end of the movie. I was jumping up and down in my seat as Tellini repeatedly bashed the killer’s head against a wall. You never saw anything that awesome on The Wonder Years. Sigh.