May 2010 Archives

Blue Wind Press published Blade Runner, A Movie, by William S. Burroughs, for the first time in 1979. Since then it has gone through two editions and I don't know how many printings. The latest edition has just been released in paperback, beautifully designed by Blue Wind publisher George Mattingly.

He notes that Blade Runner, written in the mid-1970s, "predicts a coming health care apocalypse: a horror show straight out of Dante, brought to a boil by mutated viruses and right-wing politics."

In 1982 the Ridley Scott movie came out with Burroughs' title. It was not based on the Burroughs book but was loosely adapted from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a novel by Philip K. Dick (an overrated writer whose acclaim baffles me). But never mind.

Burroughs' narrator begins like this:

Now B.J. you are asking me to tell you in one sentence what this film is about? I'm telling you it is too big for one sentence -- even a life sentence. For starters it's about the National Health Insurance we don't got. It's about plain middle-class middle-income-bracket Joe, the $15,000-a-year boy, sweating out two jobs, I.R.S. wringing the moonlight dollars out of him to keep the niggers and the spics on welfare and Medicare so they can keep up their strength to mug his grandmother, rape his sister, and bugger his ten-year-old son. How much money does 15G Joe have in the bank after I.R.S. hits him for the service?

In 2008, when "Joe the Plumber" came along and claimed to be just another working stiff hit by draconian taxes, he was making a lot more than 15Gs. He was planning to buy a company making 250Gs a year. And now he's a Tea Party poster boy.

Here's the narrator again:

This film is about overpopulation and the growth of vast service bureaucracies. The FDA and AMA and the big drug companies are like an octopus on the citizen. You're dying of cancer, see? The doctor gives you no hope, wants you out of his office as quick as possible because you don't carry health insurance or qualify for Medicare. All he gives you is a grudging Rx for Darvon. Any croaker gives a dying cancer patient Darvon should be broken down to bedpan duty in an animal hospital.

In 1974 Burroughs moved from London to Manhattan, so it's not at all surprising that he set much of Blade Runner in New York:

This film is about a city we all know and love, a city which has come to represent all cities. In the year 2014 New York, world center for underground medicine, is the most glamorous, the most dangerous, the most exotic, vital, far-out city the world has ever seen. The only public transport is the old IRT limping along at five miles an hour through dimly lit tunnels. The other lines are derelict. Hand-propelled and steam-driven cars transport produce, the stations have been converted into markets. The lower tunnels are flooded, giving rise to an underground Venice.

That future, which might have seemed distant even in the disastrous years of the 1970s and '80s, is already upon us. Just take a ride on the New York subway.

Been meaning to mention the New York premiere of Bach & friends, the full-length documentary by Michael Lawrence, at Symphony Space last Sunday. After the screening, several of the musicians from the film gave virtuoso performances for a deeply appreciative audience that filled the 760-seat Peter Jay Sharp Theatre almost to capacity. The combo concert was a stunner.

Appearing live were the cellists Zuill Bailey (who has a new Telarc recording out, Bach Cello Suites) and Matt Haimowitz; the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; and the pianists Hilda Huang, a 14-year-old prodigy who just won the top prize in a major international Bach competition; Mike Hawley, a polymath who also emceed with charming warmth; and John Bayless, an extraordinary classical improviser whose performance of his "Elegy for Henry," composed in honor of the late Henry Steinway and written for left hand, was especially moving. (Bayless suffered a stroke after his appearance in the film, which paralyzed his right hand.)

There will be another screening this Sunday, May 23, at Symphony Space, in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia, preceded by live performances, which are to begin at 5:30 p.m. The violinist Eugene Drucker, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, will play the "Saraband" from Bach's "2nd Partita." The pianist Simone Dinnerstein will then join him in a sonata for violin and piano. Richard Stoltzman and Dinnerstein will play a da gamba sonata. Dinnerstein will cap off the live performances with the "Aria" from the "Goldberg Variations," which she has also recorded. Mike Hawley will again serve as host. He hasn't decided yet what he'll play. "It depends on the piano, which I haven't tried yet," he says.

Postscript: May 28 -- Bach & friends will be screened for the last time at Symphony Space on Sunday, May 30, in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia. The documentary will be preceded again by live performances at 5:30 p.m. Fourteen-year-old prodigy Hilda Huang will play. Mike Hawley, who will host again, also will perform. There may be other live performances by musicians featured in the film, depending on who Mike Lawrence can snag on a holiday weekend.

I just finished reading a juicy crime novel, Grace, set in the Bay Area in the summer of 1972. It's about the murder of the title character, a race track worker whose body is fished out of San Francisco Bay. She was beautiful, white, and promiscuous -- and she was in love with a black man. Not just any black man, but the head of security for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, who the police are convinced is a cop killer. Which has made him Public Enemy No. 1. Naturally, he's arrested for Grace's murder.

Trouble is, a female acquaintance of Grace's -- a young white Cal Berkeley student who also works at the track -- has proof that he couldn't have killed her. It's an intriguing set-up and so are the ensuing complications.

Grace does what a crime novel should do. It creates suspense, develops an authentic atmosphere, and paints a particular time and place with all the right touches. The characters get up off the page. And the dialogue rings true from beginning to end.

The story also turns out to be something of a bildungsroman that revolves around the narrator as she delves into Grace's life and the events leading up to the murder. Needless to say, the issue of race plays a major role, not to mention Cointelpro, the Phoenix Program, and the Vietnam War.

It's possible that because I once lived in the Bay Area and knew the locale, including particulars like the race track, the Berkeley streets, and so on, I got a special charge out of the book. Many of the details about the narrator and several of the key characters seem factual, or close to it, which may be why Grace gets things so right. But it takes a real writer to make that happen.

Full disclosure: The author, Susan Sherrell, is the sister of an old friend of mine, Gail Chiarello. But who knew Susan had this kinda stuff in her? I didn't. Fuller disclosure: Gail is the publisher of the novel, along with other books at Workwomans Press.

Here's an excerpt from Grace. And here's Susan talking about the book in a radio interview.