Christopher East

Since discovering the work of Alan Furst, I’ve been rationing out his novels in order to make sure I always have a new one in my back pocket for special occasions.  Last week, I indulged by grabbing The Foreign Correspondent (2006) off my reading pile, and blazed through it in about three or four reading sessions.  Damn, only one left now!

Set in the late thirties in the anxious months leading up to World War II, The Foreign Correspondent features, as most of Furst’s historical spy novels do, a somewhat reluctant European hero caught in the middle of clashing political ideologies.  In this case it’s Carlo Weisz, an Italian citizen from a disputed-border area near Slovenia and Austria, who fled Mussolini’s fascist regime to resettle in Paris — always a major character in this author’s work.  A journalist for Reuters, Weisz moonlights for an émigré resistance newspaper called Liberazione, writing anti-fascist copy which is smuggled into Italy as an alternative news source, thumbing its nose at fascism.  Unfortunately for Weisz, the Italian secret police has gotten wind of Liberazione and targeted its staff for murder and harrassment, which thrusts Weisz squarely into the crosshairs of multiple intelligence organizations.  Complicating matters, Weisz’ brief assignment to cover Berlin rekindles a love affair with an old flame, Christa von Schirren, now married to a German military officer and embroiled in her own dangerous resistance activities.  As a border-crossing polyglot, Weisz is perfectly situated to help her, and a combination of conscience, circumstance, and opportunity compel him to risk everything to fight against the burgeoning might of the Axis powers.

As noted in my review of Kingdom of Shadows, my only real complaint about Furst’s work is that it tends to rely on familiar elements that recur from book to book.  But when it comes down to it, while formula it may be, it’s a formula I really, really like, and Furst executes it here pretty much to perfection — on completion, I pegged it immediately as his best book since Dark Star. It lacks that novel’s length and scope, perhaps, but I think part of its success is that it’s one of his most tightly focused books, boiled down to a more manageable cast of characters and plot elements, so that the pace feels a bit brisker than normal.  Even so, it displays the traditional broad canvas of Continent-spanning adventures, centered on Paris intrigue but also featuring tense sequences in Spain, Germany, Czechoslavakia, and Italy, and as usual the protagonist — and I should note that Weisz makes a particularly likeable one — moves through a convincingly rendered pre-war Europe filled with interesting historical detail.

When it comes down to it, you just can’t do much better than Furst when it comes to engaging combinations of intrigue, adventure, romance, and history.  The Foreign Correspondent is a superb addition to his body of work, and I have half a mind to race out and grab The Spies of Warsaw, because it occurs to me that maybe my hoarding strategy is flawed…I’m bound to read this all again eventually, so why not get to it?

One of the more peculiar novels I’ve read in a while, M.M. Buckner’s Watermind (2008) felt a little like a book with an identity crisis:  a unique amalgam of hard SF mystery, terrestrial first contact, unusual creature feature, near-future techno-thriller, and environmental allegory.  I’m not sure it all entirely comes together, but it still kind of works…provided you don’t hitch your reading mindset too firmly to any one mode of interpretation.

While there are many characters, the star of the show is clearly the main protagonist CJ Reilly, an impulsive, quick-minded MIT drop-out and ne’er-do-well who has been drifting through life since her academic career went bust, living in the heavy shadow of a famous scientist father.  Her latest stop in life, working on an environmental clean-up crew in the Mississippi delta, puts her on the scene of a scientific mystery when she and her new boyfriend, Creole musician Max Pottevents, stumble across a fascinating discovery:  out of the toxic spew of river pollution, a weird entity has formed, soon to be called “the colloid.”  The colloid is a spontaneously evolved “watermind” borne of years of advanced technology that has swept down through North America’s polluted river system.  Fascinated by its properties after a mysterious first encounter, CJ wants to study the find, but this pits her against her boss Roman Sacony, an ambitious corporate bigwig on whose land the colloid has formed.  Smelling lawsuits, Sacony wants the colloid contained and destroyed, and therein lies the central conflict of the novel, which escalates from slow-boiling mystery to full-blown adventure.

It’s a well paced and engagingly written novel, and Buckner has a sure hand with character, particularly Reilly, who is a well developed and lively protagonist — she’s perhaps a bit too plucky to be true, at times, but generally likeable and sympathetic.  I found the main concept too implausible to swallow whole, but even so the premise is compellingly realized and neat enough that I was able to suspend disbelief (and my Mundane SF proclivities) to enjoy the ride.  I ricocheted through several reading mindsets with this one — hard SF?  monster movie?  cautionary metaphor? — before deciding it was best read as a straight-up SF adventure, and I can picture it making a fun big budget film with its unique visual potential.  There are aspects of the book I didn’t like — the obtrusively omniscient viewpoint (generally not my favorite narrative choice), a particularly unconvincing romantic subplot, the tendency of characters to talk to themselves — but for the most part I enjoyed the read.  It’s a brisk, enjoyable book that tries to be many things, and mostly succeeds.

The Norwegian film O’Horten (2007) may be the first film I’ve ever watched based entirely on being intrigued by the movie poster (spotted a while back  at the Encino Laemmle).  The poster features a faintly smiling, aging man wearing an engineer’s uniform, holding a large dog with sad-puppy eyes.  I’m not sure why this image captured my interest, and it certainly doesn’t say much about the film…but oddly, the film turned out to be exactly what I expected.

Odd Horten (Baard Owe) is an engineer reaching the end of an illustrious forty-year career in the rail service.  A calm, clockwork man, Horten’s  retirement party is the first in a number of low-key, mildly amusing adventures in disrupted routine that characterize his difficult adjustment to the post-working world.  It’s a very…okay, very slow film, particularly in the early stages, and certainly by design — O’Horten’s routine, play-it-safe existence until now makes shifting to the endless free time of retirement an epic struggle, and director Bent Hamer milks that dignified awkwardness for all its worth.  It requires a patient viewer, but I think the slow-build pays off, as the protagonist’s transformation truly feels earned.  And meanwhile, the snowy landscapes of rural Norway and the dark, slick streets of Oslo provide a unique glimpse of another corner of the world (another reason I enjoy foreign cinema).  This one’s not for everybody, and definitely slow, but ultimately I found it a good-hearted, rewarding film.

If you thought public concern about ubiquitous surveillance was a recent phenomenon, The Anderson Tapes (1971) — a crime caper with a distinctly 1970s political angle — will probably disabuse you of that notion.  This was one of the few Sidney Lumet films from that time period I hadn’t seen yet, but now I’ve caught up via Netflix.

The story revolves around an elaborate burglary, orchestrated by Duke Anderson (Sean Connery), a safe-cracker who’s just served a ten-year prison sentence and is anxious to get back to work upon his release.  Shortly after a booty call to his old flame Ingrid (Dyan Cannon), Anderson decides — somewhat arbitrarily — to knock off the entire ritzy apartment building she lives in.  To that end he rounds up a crew, which includes such notables as Martin Balsam and a young Christopher Walken, and he secures funding from an old mafia connection (Alan King).  Then he leads his team into action, planning to loot every last valuable from the highly secure building.

It all sounds like classic heist material, but think again — if you’re expecting precision timing, narrow escapes, and pure visual story-telling, you’re not going to get it.  The film isn’t so much about the crime as it is  about the muddled and incompetent response of the authorities, who are surveilling many of the criminals from the outset (and the film makes no bones about this) but are so uncoordinated they fail head it off adequately.  Sadly, something of a timeless message, there…but unfortunately it’s embedded in rather dated packaging.  The Anderson Tapes is very much a product of its era, from its “futuristic” title fonts to its esoteric, if jazzy, Quincy Jones score.  It also pulls off that dubious 1970s trick of incorporating ostensibly liberal/progressive elements, without really doing so all that flatteringly.  (See Balsam’s flamboyantly homosexual antiques dealer and Cannon’s sexually liberated golddigger — characters that probably would have been controversial a few years earlier, and therefore welcome in a sense, but not all that sympathetically treated by the script.)  Still, one of the things I like most about movies from this time period is that they can be so casually ambitious thematically; this could easily have been a mindlessly enjoyable entertainment, but its inherently political message makes it a much more interesting film than it otherwise would have been.  I wish it had made that message a bit less sloppily, but even so I found it worth a look.

After years away from the format, I feel like an inexpert judge of comic books, but lately I’ve been dipping into some of the stuff on Jenn’s shelf and I’ve been rather enjoying Joss Whedon’s comics work — to be specific, his futuristic sequel to the Buffy universe, Fray, and his Astonishing X-Men books.

Fray is an effective continuation of Whedon’s slayer lore, set in a gritty dystopian future that nonetheless contains some spiffy Gernsbackian sense of wonder elements.  It involves the new Slayer, Melaka Fray, an urban thief very much in the mold of Buffy and Faith, who learns of her fate when a fierce-looking demon Watcher comes calling.  There’s a new Apocalypse a-brewin’ and Melaka is the latest reluctant Chosen One.  Fray shows in miniature a lot of what Whedon does best in his TV work — strong characters, distinctive and funny dialogue, high stakes situations, groups standing together against dire threats, betrayal and tragedy and maintaining hope against seemingly insurmountable odds.  I’m not sure I’d call it essential reading, but Buffy and Angel completists will probably enjoy checking it out.

Whedon also displays a sure hand with The Astonishing X-Men, which I also enjoyed, to a somewhat lesser degree.  I’m a bit out of touch with the Marvel universe but from what I can tell its lore has been revised and rebooted pretty continually, so I feel a little lost there figuring who’s dead, whose alive, what timeline we’re in, and so forth.  Even so, Whedon has a deft handle on his particular X-Men lineup (Cyclops, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Wolverine, and Beast) and the art is exceptional here (I’m particularly fond of how Beast is rendered).  Anyway, some fun, if not terribly deep reading…I like comics but they sure seemed to last longer when I was a kid!

Speaking of Whedon, Dollhouse has officially been given the axe by Fox, which sadly does not come as much of a surprise.  I, for one, am  disappointed — although wildly uneven, at its best Dollhouse is an impressively dark and ambitious show, and it’s gotten increasingly more interesting since the last few episodes of season one.  (The most recent couple of episodes have been particularly strong.)  That said, Dollhouse has never really seemed like Whedon in his wheelhouse, so part of me isn’t too upset that this experiment is going to close up shop.  It just means we’ll get to see an entirely new project down the road; looking forward to it!

So my TV writing ambitions are pretty solidly fixed to the backburner these days, but I still like to sample shows — for “research,” and also to make sure I’m not missing anything.  DVR is awesome for this, and now we can stream Netflix to our TV, so it’s easier than ever find stuff to watch.

First up:  White Collar, which is on USA Network.  It’s about an FBI agent in the white collar crimes division, Peter Burke (the awesome Tim DeKay), who takes on as an unofficial partner notorious con man and counterfeiter Neal Caffrey (Matthew Bomer).  Burke’s methodical investigative skill and Caffrey’s brilliant criminal mind and shady underworld connections make them an effective crime-stopping duo.  This one reminds me a bit of Castle – the professional cop saddled (a bit unconvincingly) with an unorthodox partner, a mystery-of-the-week procedural, getting most of its mileage off the interplay of its starring duo.  I think it might have more potential for surprise than Castle, though.  DeKay (who played Jonesy on Carnivale) and Bomer (superslick spy Bryce Larkin from Chuck, a tonally similar show) have instant odd-couple chemistry, the white collar territory is a nice change of pace from the homicide/forensics material so often dominating these kinds of shows, and the lore surrounding Caffrey’s girlfriend looks like it could lead to interesting throughlines.  The pilot was quite promising, the second episode pretty messy, but DeKay and Bomer are solid in both.  (Also featuring Tiffani Thiessen as the “agent’s wife the writers won’t know what to do with every week.”)

In a similar vein, we caught the first episode of TNT’s Leverage, a modern-day update of Mission: Impossible…or maybe The A-Team…at any rate, a derivative but energetic show about a team of brilliant criminals who undertake impossible heists at the behest of their Robin Hoodish mastermind (Timothy Hutton).  The tactics are familiar, but if the pilot’s any indication it’s got style and confidence to burn, great music, and a promising cast (including Coupling’s Gina Bellman and Angel’s Christian Kane).

On the science fiction front, I’ve given up on FlashForward – I just couldn’t bring myself to care about its run-of-the-mill characters, and lost interest pretty quickly.  And now having seen the pilot episode, I’m having a similar reaction to the new V, the latest property to be getting the reboot treatment (forgive me that bloody word).  It feels a little like Battlestar Galactica is what they’re going for, but so far I’m not convinced.  As with FlashForward, I had a hard time getting behind its generic characters — and as much as I like Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk, so far that’s not looking like it’s going to be enough.  Also, the subliminal politics seem a little fishy…only sinister reptilian aliens would offer the world universal health care, right?  Evil commie-liberal aliens, really?  Food for thought.  Well, maybe.  I have some nostalgia for the original series, so I might give it a few more chances.

I kind of had a Better Off Ted reaction to Community, a well cast and well performed comedy that has all the elements of a funny show, but that wasn’t quite funny enough to win me over.  It’s got potential, but I’m throwing my time to Modern Family instead.

Also, if you haven’t been watching Dexter, by all means check it out.  I don’t have Showtime so I’ve been watching it on DVD, and just finished season three — it’s gripping, addictive stuff.  Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter are amazing in it…probably my favorite show running since The Wire wrapped up.  Not for the feint of heart, but fascinating…check it out.

Also quickly noted:  I’ve been enjoying old episodes of The Rockford Files (I so relate to Rockford’s self-effacing eye-rolling behavior), L.A. Kings hockey (they’re looking dangerous this year!), and Uncharted 2:  Among Thieves, which I will consider a viewing experience:  it’s a video game on the PS3 that alternates between being a “third-person shooter, with jumping” and an Indiana Jonesish adventure movie.  The graphics need to be seen to be believed — I mean, seriously stunning — and this is a gaming title that really seems to be taking advantage of the potential for video games to be engaging story-telling enterainment.  Fun stuff.

I haven’t been writing all that much lately, which is usually a bad thing, but lately it’s just because my writing time has been usurped by GarageBand.

GarageBand is a music program that comes on the Mac.  When I first switched from PC a few years ago, I gave it a cursory test drive, but didn’t find its workings all that intuitive and I sort of forgot about it.  But recently I gave it a more concerted effort, and it turned out to be less difficult to use than I thought.  Now that I’ve got the fundamentals down, I’m using it pretty obsessively.  It’s a  great tool for the lapsed musician, especially an ear player — my theory has always been pretty shoddy, but I’m good at figuring things out, so GarageBand is a perfect fit for me.  Basically by layering beats, percussion, and loops, and bending the pitches to give the songs shape, you can actually “compose” music.  (It’s a little like finger-painting with notes, in some ways, so I’m sure real musicians would look at it as a “cheat” — but hey, that doesn’t make it any less fun!)  My weak area tends to be coming up with melodies, but I’m working on it.

So anyway, if my blogging has slowed down in the past month or so, or if you’re an editor eagerly awaiting my next story [*snurk--spit-take--hahahaha!*]…well, GarageBand is to blame.  I’m working up a collection of songs, most of which sound like 1970s TV theme music — remember when TV shows had theme songs?  The album-in-progress is called Episodic. Not available in stores…

Oh, and just in case you weren’t aware how awesome my girlfriend is she surprised me yesterday with plug-and-play keyboard and percussion pad accessories.  Jenn, you rock! 

Anybody else played with this program?  Are the expansion kits worth buying?  If I’m still enjoying this a couple months from now, I might try have to try them out.

Wow, these months really aren’t slowing down much…it’s time for the new Futurismic story already, and this month we go a little deeper into the future with “Spider’s Moon” by Lavie Tidhar.  Tidhar has a unique voice and this one’s full of cool, intriguing ideas…stop by and check it out!