Call me crazy but I still think that the best place to buy a book is in a book store. A book store is also the best place to buy several books, especially on impulse. See it, pick it up, read a little bit, heed the impulse to buy it. And repeat. And that's how I ended up reading Jennifer Grey's autobiography, Out of the Corner.
The two things that everyone knows about Jennifer Grey is that she was in Dirty Dancing and she had a nose job. What you'll learn from this book, though, is that she's a great writer who's had a fascinating life. She's also knowledgable and resourceful enough to know that she needs to get the two things everyone knows about her out of the way right up front. So the title references the famous line from Dirty Dancing, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner," which both she and Patrick Swayze, who delivers it, thought was ridiculous and apparently pleaded with the filmmakers to change. And the first chapter starts late in the chronology, walking us through why she had work on her nose done and what the disastrous results of it were. But her life story is a lot richer and more interesting than that. The daughter of Joel Grey, she used to sit in his dressing room while he transformed himself into the Master of Ceremonies for Cabaret. The granddaughter of great Borscht Belt musician and comedian Mickey Katz, she's a third generation performing arts star. She's also a teenager struggling with bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, with hippie mellowdom on the beach and high intensity demanding schedules back on the East Coast. There's a horrible account of sexual assault that the people she loves and trusts most simply dismiss. And her initiation into relationships has numerous dubious characters as participants. Older, abusive philanderers, starving artist-types who are good for hot sex on a lunch break, an engagement to Johnny Depp and a very serious love affair with Matthew Broderick, whom she met when they played siblings in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Her first movie job was in Coppola's The Cotton Club, dropped into the thick of it, as it were, with legendary, intense and high-powered actors and an equally intimidating director. The movie isn't really under anyone's control so a lot of her scenes don't make the final cut. She meets Patrick Swayze when they're both cast in Red Dawn but they didn't get along. When Dirty Dancing comes around, she wants her co-star to be anyone but him. But he pleads with her to let him make up for their previous past experience and part of what makes that movie work is this tension between them, their differences mapping onto their characters' differences. Their different skills and training in dance are also mirrored by their fictional counterparts. An adolescent in dangerous sex and drug situations, a child of Broadway and Hollywood royalty who pursues acting as a vocation, the star of a huge international hit movie that literally nobody expected would do more than shift a few videotape rentals... Once Grey gets married and has a daughter, the change in her reality is palpable to the reader. It's too bad that she doesn't have anything to say about the episode of House she was in, because she plays a new mother willing to sacrifice herself completely for her baby, and that's the person Grey describes herself as in real life. I never thought I would care about Dancing With the Stars but her account of working on that show was gripping. The whole books is beautifully written, with wonderful phrases and pithy observations on every page. The first line is "Whenever I found myself stuck in one of life's big dips, I could count on my ever-loving mother's familiar refrain, 'In case of emergency, break nose'".
2025 April 07 • Monday
Here's the great Billy Strange with the 851st Soundtrack of the Week: Secret Agent File.
This appears to be a CD reissue of a Billy Strange album but with a few extra tracks thrown in, which explains why Jim Rockford is thrown in with a bunch of movie and television spies. Billy Strange doesn't even get to open the record. Neil Norman does, with an instrumenal version of "All Time High" that segues into the "James Bond Theme". They call the whole thing "Octopussy". Then Strange gets to take on the theme from "I Spy" and it's really good, solid, hard to mess that up. But then we ditch Strange for the Olympic Orchestea's theme from "Reilly: Ace of Spies" and this really doesn't fit in at all. It's a nice, fake classical orchestral piece but musically clashes with the rest of the record and just comes across as dull. Next is Burt Bacharach's "Casino Royale", which feels a little sluggish compared to the original. Finally we get some killer electric guitar tone for John Barry's "The Ipcress File". Actually it might be baritone guitar. They throw in the famous drum beat that opens "Be My Baby" and also have a pretty tough backbeat throughout. "Thunderball" is, thankfully, another guitar feature, though this time the tone is snarly and sounds like just the bridge pick-up is being used. Some good sax playing in the background too. The guitar also sounds awesome on Jerry Goldsmith's theme from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.". Again I suspect baritone. There's some cool keyboard playing but they changed the meter from 5/4 to 4/4 and that's a shame. A Neil Norman arrangement of the theme from "The Prisoner" follows this, another piece that wasn't on Strange's original album. It's a good-faith take on the original but lacks its energy. Now we get to hear the "James Bond Theme" for the second time and of course kills that famous guitar riff. Nothing's ever going to improve on the original recording, whether the soundtrack or album version, of Jerry Goldsmith's "Our Man Flint" theme, but I don't mind hearing this one. The guitar is great, of course, and there's some good flute playing and interesting use of horns. "Moonraker" is one of my favorite Bond themes and this is another Neil Norman addition. Eh, it's too fast and discoey for my taste. Then we take a break from swinging entirely for the slow, moody, atmospheric "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". It's in 3/4 and has a chilly, damp feel to it, perfectly appropriate. When people did a record like this they tried to put an original piece of their own on it so they could get publishing royalties. Presumably that's what "Run Spy, Run" is, even though that's also the name of the first Nick Carter: Killmaster book, which came out the year before this record. It's a cool tune and would have done well as the theme for a secret agent movie or tv show. Probably the most famous 12/8 movie or tv theme in history (what are some others?) comes up next: "Get Smart". The rhythm section starts out having to keep things pretty straight, then suggest a "Peter Gunn" feel before there's an explosion of great guitar, saxophone and organ playing. Which was really needed. It wasn't especially exciting until that happened. My favorite of all Bond themes, "You Only Live Twice", happens now. The original will always be the greatest but there are several great covers. The one by The Quiets is maybe the best I've heard. This one is respectable but lacks intensity. "007" is a great action cue that's in many of the Bond films. I used to play it in my first band! Or at least I tried to. It's a nice feature for Strange's guitar, which always sounds great. But it's another one that sounds kind of watered down. It might have something to do with the recording or mixing or mastering. It goes into a kind of goofy saxophone solo too. The energy picks up a bit for "Goldfinger" and the guitar is bright and sharp and engaging. Finally there's "The Rockford Files" because... well, I don't know why. Different decade, different genre. But whatever. I always love to hear it and while this isn't as good as the original—it's a little too slow, for one thing—it's cool to hear Strange's low-toned and tremoloey guitar playing this terrific melody.
2025 April 04 • Friday
Here's another hefty thriller but unlike the first Jack Reacher novel, it's under 500 pages. Not much under, but still. William Diehl's Sharky's Machine was also his first novel but did not kick off a series.
It takes some time to get to Sharky. The action starts in Italy during World War 2, and an operation gone wrong that leaves four million dollars' worth of gold at the bottom of a lake. Then we're in Hong Kong in the 1950s for an assassination scene in a brothel that Trevanian probably wished he could have used in Shibumi. Finally we're in Atlanta in the 1970s for another murder, after which we meet undercover narcotics officer Sharky, who's in the middle of a big bust when some other police officer blunders onto the scene and ruins everything. Next thing you know there's a psycho drug dealer on a city bus at rush hour about to kill a bunch of kids and old people so Sharky blows him away, saving everyone's lives, but then in the newspapers the next day the story is that Sharky is somehow the jerk so his mean boss kicks him down to the vice squad. And I'm pretty sure this involves a continuity error but I'm not going to worry about it. So down in vice they think they've got a handle on a prostitution blackmail ring, featuring a practically superhumanly adroit and alluring woman named Domino, another one that probably made Trevanian jealous. She's involved with a presidential candidate and a mysterious rich guy who has a James Bond villain-worthy scheme to open this gigantic amusement park called Pachinko! which replicates a huge chunk of Hong Kong right here in Atlanta and has as its centerpiece a massive pachinko/pinball machine in which people get into the actual balls and zip through the game, being bounced off the bumpers. He has evil henchmen galore and most of them have impressive scars. So Sharky runs into Domino and there's a spark between them and then they run into each other again at the grocery store and there's more of a spark and so she invites him over for soup and they're basically in love. But then Sharky has to go up to the roof where he can listen to the hidden bugs in her apartment and he hears her having really intense sex with the mysterious rich guy and Sharky is so into her that up there on the roof all by himself he gets turned on and orgasms when she does. Diehl is not wasting our time here. This is a thriller and a police procedural that veers back and forth between plausible and ludicrous but offers non-stop action, distinct if not believable characters and no-nonsense sex and violence. It has a George Eliot epigraph. Sharky himself has a harrowing scene after getting captured by the bad guys at one point and, well, he will never be the same after. This is a book where bad things can happen to good people and not be fixed. Nobody writes books like this anymore, right? This is of its time. The last gasp of the thriller before horror novels became the thrill, I guess. I liked it. I'm going to watch the movie and I wouldn't mind reading something else by Diehl. The first line is "It had been dark less than an hour when Younger and the two sergeants finished loading their equipment on the three mules and prepared to head north toward Torbole and the rendezvous with La Volte".
2025 April 02 • Wednesday
I've been hearing about Lee Child's Jack Reacher for years now but not in any persuasive way. The people who enthuse about the series tend not to be the people whose recommendations for tough action novels would carry much weight. My mother, for one example. A Times Literary Supplement editor for another. So this is a bit like Martin Amis going nuts for Elmore Leonard. Elmore Leonard did actually write a lot of really good books and Amis is correct to admire them. But he was almost certainly an ignoramus when it came to the genre itself and I suspect he was at least partly just relieved to be on vacation from so-called literary fiction. Which is all fine. But as someone who has been seeking out and enjoying examples of the genre for practically my entire life, I was suspicious. I assumed we were talking about tough lone wolf violence for people who don't like that sort of thing. Quoted passages from the books left me unmoved. A Lee Child opinion piece about writing was also unimpressive. But I found a copy of Killing Floor, the first Reacher novel, in a Little Free Library and took it home with me. Several years later—I have a lot of books—I took it with me on a trip to the west coast.
Jack Reacher walks into a small town in Georgia and is immediately arrested for a murder he doesn't even know anything about, let alone have anything to do with. As the story is told from his point of view, he's able to tell the reader a lot about himself by how he handles the situation. He could easily disarm and overpower the police officers taking him to jail but he doesn't because he's innocent and this will all work itself out. In addition to a life in the military that's made him almost superhumanly strong and trained in, I'm going to predict, practically infinite methods of violent attack and defense, he was in the military police for years, so he also knows about police procedures and psychology. So his confidence is understandable.
What's not understandable is why,
after 100 pages of being an ex-Army,
badass Sherlock Holmes—he does the
old deduce a complete stranger's life
from his clothing and mannerisms—he's
baffled when the
warden of the jail tries to have
him killed. "I couldn't begin to figure it out," he tells us, but it's clear that this uncharacteristic cluelessness is simply there so this book can be over 500 pages long. There's been a violent murder that involved at least three people. There's a conspiracy involving a local rich banker. And Reacher himself has been set up and framed by the chief of police! When the chief of police is lying to make you take the fall for a murder and then the warden of the prison tries to set you up as the next vicitm, this is a clear case of adding two and two together to get four. Your fake murder suspect gets killed, you get to say he did it, case closed. But even though Reacher has, until this point, known everything about everything and been way more than merely competent in every situation, this plot point, which wouldn't stump a child, is all of a sudden a baffling mystery to him. And that's a shame because so far this has been a pleasant sort of spin on In the Heat of the Night, with an out-of-town Sherlock Holmes-type being falsely arrested for murder and then having to solve the crime himself. (Reacher's older brother is eventually introduced and he turns out to have some shades of Mycroft.) And the mystery part is pretty well drawn out, even though the reader is also frustrated by the old "character who could clear up everything by speaking a few sentences to the hero but just won't do it" device. There are also the helpful "information dump" characters, complete strangers who open up and regurgitate huge amounts of information to help Reacher when Child just needs to get him somewhere. Which is super convenient because Reacher is frequently making it harder on himself. At one point, he has no more leads. Just a dead end. And it's time sensitive. He only has a few days to discover what's going on. But then these two bad guys show up in town asking where Reacher is and, when they find him, start following him. Well, this could be a lead, right? Get the drop on these guys, force them to answer some questions. Sure, maybe it'll be another dead end, maybe they don't know anything. But, hey, then again, maybe not. But Reacher just kills them both without a word. I'm guessing author or editor or both decided there needed to be some action in this section of the book so a little bit of cat and mouse was thrown in. To sum up, it's not bad. It's not very good either. But it seems to me that, like many an author, Child hadn't really figured it out in the first book of the series. The biggest problem is that it's over-written, and in what quickly becomes a faux naif first-person voice. (In the second and I assume all other books, Child corrects this, switching to third person, and it reads much, much better.) Killing Floor is over 500 pages long and could have been half that length if Reacher were a more consistent character and a lot less verbose. Here's a typical example, one of hundreds of descriptive paragraphs, setting a scene that's neither important nor revisited: On its own it might not seem like a big deal but this happens more than once a page. So much describing that it quickly becomes blather. There are five sentences about the path to this person's door. Four sentences about the door itself! (Or sentence fragments, if you want to be punctilious.) And it's like that all the time. Here's a paragraph that could have been cut entirely: All that could have been cut and we just skip to the next paragraph where it says they made some phone calls and confirmed his alibi. Reacher's done it a thousand times and we've all seen it or read it a thousand times too. It's a tableau of cliché. Also, is that really the story she told him? "Yeah, Finlay and I started work on your alibi late Friday evening. We were in the squad room. It was dark but we turned on a couple of desk lights. We had pads of paper and cups of coffee. Telephone books, too, and we were looking up numbers and calling them while cradling the phones and chewing pencils. We kept our voices low and our enquiries patient." You see the problem? Why is Reacher always yammering on so pointlessly? It's the text equivalent of empty calories. And of course for a lot of people, a book like this, probably the entire genre, is presumed to be junk food. What's the point of criticizing the nutritional value of something like Doritos? The point is that Doritos could be good if they were made to be good. And if you like what you get from Doritos and wish that they were actually "good", you can find something better if you try. Anyway, back to Killing Floor. There's a real howler of a scene set at the Atlanta airport, which is wildly unbelievable even by the conventions of the genre. Child describes Reacher as "six feet five inches tall, and around two hundred pounds, all of it muscle". And yet he's completely unable to cope with walking against the current of passengers leaving a commercial airplane, despite his size, strength and formidable training in, well, just about everything. I'm five feet ten inches tall, about a hundred and ninety pounds, a lot of it not muscle, comfortable with a bicycle and a tennis racket but not much else, and this would not be a problem for me at all. And once the thing that happens in this scene happens, if you pause for a moment to consider the logistics of it, it gets even more ridiculous. But... first book. I'm cutting it some slack. The excerpt from the second book was enough of an improvement that I'll give it a shot. If I find it as serendipitously as I found the first one. I have a lot of other books waiting at home. The first line in this one is "I was arrested in Eno's diner".
Stoller's building was way in back. Probably the first phase to have been built. The old man in the poor part of town had said his son moved out years ago. That could be about right. This first block could be about two years old. We threaded through walkways and around raised-up flower beds. Walked up a path to Sherman Stoller's door. The path was stepping stones set in the wiry lawn. Forced an unnatural gait. I had to step short. Roscoe had to stretch her stride from one flagstone to the next. We reached the door. It was blue. No shine on it. Old-fashioned paint.
She told me a pretty straightforward story. They'd started work on my alibi late Friday evening. She and Finlay. A dark squad room. A couple of desk lights on. Pads of paper. Cups of coffee. Telephone books. The two of them cradling phones and chewing pencils. Low voices. Patient enquiries. A scene I'd been in myself a thousand times.
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