Read This: Jack Fish

So I’ve been dipping back into J Milligan’s Jack Fish, in anticipation of his appearance tonight at Coliseum Books, and it’s reminding me all over again why I like it so much. Sure, a lot of it has to do with its New York-specific, and for that matter outer-borough-specific, humor, but saying it’s “just a New York book” would be like saying The Brother From Another Planet is “just a New York movie.” And, yeah, I chose that example quite deliberately. Here’s the thing: I love science fiction that stays true to its central conceits, but doesn’t feel the constant need to take itself so damn seriously. So I dig the Pohl & Kornbluth collaborations, I dig Robert Sheckley and Frederic Brown, and now I’m digging J Milligan.

16 March 2006 | read this |

Gordon Parks, 1912-2006

Gordon Parks died yesterday at the age of 93. Not only as the author of a book on ’70s Hollywood, but simply as a lover of great film, I was familiar with Parks’s movies, but they were only one facet of his amazing talent. He was a photographer, a novelist, a memoirist, a magazine editor, a composer…just about whatever he needed to be to express himself from moment to moment.

After the early cinematic successes of The Learning Tree and Shaft, Parks ended his big-screen directing career in 1976 after Leadbelly, starring Roger E. Mosley as blues pioneer Heddy Ledbetter, flopped with critics and audiences alike. I tried very hard to track down a copy of the film, which doesn’t appear to be available in any video formats, as I was researching my book; I suspect that in many ways it would counter the much more widely-known Bound for Glory biopic of Woody Guthrie and that, like many commercial “failures” from that era, it would have much to offer us upon a second viewing.

8 March 2006 | obituaries |