The Inside Process of Writing My Novel

I've put a lot of work into outlining a novel, and now I'm excited to be in the actual writing phase. Yesterday, I wrote the book's first paragraph.

The coming-of-age story will focus closely on character, particularly the relationship between the book's narrator, who is a journalist at a music magazine and a rock star he met 26 years previously. The two will have a conflicted, deep, and surprisingly regular friendship. The story begins at the rock star's funeral.

As I write, I'll be doing quite a bit of research along the way because the story takes place between 1976 and now, and it weaves quite a bit of actual history into the fictional story.

To help me place the book and give it the right feel throughout, I've been reading a lot of pop-culture history books on the years of 1976 until today. I'll discuss several of them here over the coming days. The first one is simply called The 1970s, by Kelly Boye Sagert. It's pretty much just a textbook that focuses on the influences upon Americans of advertising, architecture, fashion, food, leisure activities, literature, music, performing arts, travel, and visual arts. It doesn't really have a thesis, but the time lines are helping me conceptualize all the weaving back and forth between time periods that my novel will accomplish.

The basics are stated by Sagert: "The 1970s were a giant cauldron of fads, fancies, and fetishes ... trendy times." Dubbed the "Me Decade" by the great novelist Tom Wolfe (someone I definitely cite as an influence for the novel I'm writing), this was a decade in which "one's personal emotions were paramount; the quirky pet rock, popular in large part because it did not require any effort; and a plethora of first-person songs that focused on individual feelings." Of course, the vociferous women's rights movement of the decade shows that this is not necessarily a decade to be classified so easily.

The next historical-time line books I'll tell you about will dig a little deeper ...

Getting a Mad Men Fix Through Frank Sinatra

In an attempt to help get in the right mood for Mad Men's third season return to TV, I decided to start reading Mr. S, a book about Frank Sinatra by his former assistant, George Jacobs.

Sure enough, this much thinking about Ol' Blue Eyes had me thinking about cocktails in the afternoon (which I could, technically, enjoy, since I just began a 10-week sabbatical) and all the other romanticized/stupid notions of an era gone by.

Mr. S begins in Summer 1968, when Sinatra's disintegrated marriage to the much-younger actress (and later to be married to Woody Allen) Mia Farrow gets ugly at their Bel Air estate north of Sunset Boulevard. He is disgusted by Farrow and her generation's "permissive youth culture [that is] a threat to the American Way." They eventually live separately in the house and refuse to speak to each other.

Jacobs, who obviously experienced some very behind-the-scenes moments with Sinatra, notes that "the weirdest part [about this time period] was that there was no music. Mr. S didn't play his jazz, didn't play his Puccini, and Mia didn't play her Beatles or her Moody Blues. It was truly the sounds of silence, and it was loud as hell."

Sinatra "detested hippies, detested long hair, even had his screenwriters write in jibes about them in his films." He also hated the mods, the Beatles and Stones, and the swinging London Carnaby Street scene. He didn't care how good any of the new music was, he just viewed it as one big excuse for people to take drugs.

Another sign of Sinatra's being from a different era than that of Farrow's, he always called his helper "George," although sometimes, especially in front of his gangster friends, he called him "Spook," which he claims didn't bother him.

The best thing about being Sinatra's assistant was this: "Except for Mia, hip young chicks had no interest in meeting Frank Sinatra in those days. He was off the radar of coolness. [But] my working for him ... was what was cool. It was like working at the White House. It made folks want to meet you. It gave you a mystique."

Another fun fact in the early pages of this book: Stylist Jay Sebring made house calls to cut the super-sensitive, balding Sinatra's hair. Sebring was soon to be murdered by Charles Manson's gang.

I love this Mad Men-like stuff, and can't wait to get back to this book.

Julia Child Doesn't Cut Off Her Finger in Julie & Julia

My fondest memories of the lovable master chef Julia Child were produced by Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live when I was a kid in the 1970s.

So when the bloody skit in which he cuts off his finger is slapped down in the middle of the new movie Julie & Julia, it's understandably my favorite part.

But the rest of the film is excellent as well. Meryl Streep probably deserves to win the Academy Award for her portrayal of Child, wonderful voice and all. It will no doubt be her 16th nomination at the least. Amy Adams, who is beginning to compile quite an impressive resume herself, will also likely be nominated for either best actress or best supporting actress. Stanley Tucci as Julia's husband, Paul, is no slouch either.

This is the first movie about the life of a blogger, and for a while in the middle, I was thinking Amy Adam's half of the movie was unnecessary and it should have strictly been a portrayal of the life of Julia Child. But I warmed up nicely to Adams' sometimes-narcissistic blogger, who's hook was that she cooked the 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. This drives her boss and husband crazy at times. And curiously, in real life, Child apparently heard about this blog before her death and didn't think highly of it, which seems hypocritical and very unlike her loving and fairly racy personality.

**** out of ***** stars

Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain: Murdered!

Ian Halperin is the New York Times' writer who caused a minor uproar last December when he reported that Michael Jackson would be dead in six months. Jackson's official spokesperson, Dr. Tohme Tohme, called the report a "total fabrication" and that the singer was in "fine health."

"Most of the media took his word for it and the feeding frenzy came to an abrupt halt. Six months and one day later, Jackson was dead." This is detailed in the just-released book, Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, by Halperin.

Halperin, you may recall, made his name several years back after another big-time musician died. Official investigations found that Kurt Cobain had killed himself, but Halperin had spoken with "a number of people who had known Cobain, including one of his heroin dealers and his best friend, who told me that everything was not as it appeared. They were convinced that ... he had been murdered."

Looking into what he still believed to be a conspiracy theory, the author later discovered that Kurt's wife, Courtney Love, had hired a Beverly Hills private investigator right before his death until several months later, when he abruptly quit and publicly accused Love of murdering her husband.

Back to Jackson, Halperin initially reported, at the end of 2008, that the singer had a "potentially fatal genetic condition and that he could barely walk." Further, the next photos released of Jackson showed him "being pushed in a wheelchair and wearing a surgical mask."

There's all kinds of juice for Jackson-heads in this whopper of a book (which immediately shot to number 1 on the New York Times best-seller list). His ever-changing facial features were designed to make him look like Diana Ross. After he and Ross had a falling out, he changed course to look like Diana, Princess of Wales. Jackson was indeed very much inclined to child molesting. He also had at least two long-term love affairs with other men. Etc.

For those who want a rollicking read, this (along with Halperin's personal Web site) is a real thriller.

Vietnam's Best, Brightest, and Dumbest Military Commanders

While David Halberstam was in Vietnam as a war correspondence, it was easy to hear news from the North Vietnamese leaders about peace marches and protest statements from leaders back home, but "news about their military setbacks or the means Hanoi employed in prosecuting the war was rather hard to come by."

This is the information in the famed New York Times journalist's most acclaimed book, 1972's The Best and the Brightest, that is fascinating. Unfortunately, that excerpt is from the foreword, written by Vietnamese prisoner-of-war and U.S. Senator John McCain, not Halberstam.

The bulk of Halberstam's story focuses on the foreign-policy mechanisms back home, namely the U.S. government and Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administration officials who so badly misjudged -- despite being the country's "best and brightest" -- the enemy's resolve, America's power, our South Vietnamese allies, the Soviets, the Chinese, the world, and, most of all, themselves.

There is some interesting commentary on the life of a journalist, such as how to treat coverage of JFK, who was in a position traditionally given (mostly) full respect by the White House press corps and what happens is you have fewer bylines while overseas at war (does the journalist "disappear" in reality along with those bylines?). Many of these types of questions became part of the required dialogue for decades afterwards in J-schools, newspapers, and PR firms.

So for that reason, I think Halberstam deserves some credit and respect. But as a detailer of the politics of the period, I'm less impressed than the adoring mass of critics before me. Halberstam definitely digs deep, but it's exactly that detail that bogs the book (and, hence, the story) down. The sheer amount of characters and detail becomes so confusing that I lost the ability to care for any of them and actually gave up on the book fairly early on.

I'm sure some of my readers whole-heartedly disagree. If so, please point me to a later chapter or two that I "must" read. Then I might reconsider my negative reaction to what is largely considered Halberstam's greatest work. Until then, I'm setting this book aside.

Charleton Heston, Pass Me the Matza: The Big Rewind

Nathan Rabin, an arts editor for The Onion, writes his memoir by how "music, books, films, television, and, to a much lesser extent, haikus, bumper stickers, and ... comic strips shaped and molded me."

The title may say all you need to know about this book. The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture. Rabin claims to be just another member of "my generation, a lost tribe of latchkey kids raised on hip-hop and Quentin Tarantino, a demographic for whom pop culture references constitute an invaluable common cultural currency."

Pop culture for Rabin has consistently help him escape his life-long battle with depression. Each of the book's 22 chapters begins with a pop artifact that helped define that period of his life. The first chapter, for instance, is all about the Jewish rapper Matisyahu and how he relates to Rabin's own views on Judaism, which basically amounts to nothing more than celebrating Passover Seder because Charleton Heston freed the Jews from the evil Yul Brynner.

"The Passover Seder has filled me with a sense of consistency, continuity, and stability at times when my life sorely lacked all three." For Rabin, Judaism is much more about the community formed between a cultural history that includes Woody Allen, Philip Roth, and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" than it is about the Talmud.

It's an interesting idea for a book, but it doesn't necessarily account for the fact that Rabin's life just isn't that interesting and he may well have been better suited to putting all his pop-culture references into a novel or some genre other than the memoir.

District 9 Leaves 'Em Wantin' More

The phrase, "Always leave them wanting more" usually makes sense, but the new District 9 has so many unanswered questions that it suffers.

About a third of the movie is eaten up by a wearying action sequence that would have been better spent adding some back story to the aliens or more of the political intrigue of how they were able to be contained in a Johannesburg, South Africa slum, for instance.

As it is, District 9 has a few creative elements but relies far too frequently on old tricks from movies like E.T., Transformers, Terminator, Planet of the Apes, and 28 Weeks Later. The acting if very good, the documentary elements hint at telling a great story, and the social commentary touches on how barbaric uneducated humans often are and how business usually trumps government, but the herky-jerky motion of much of the camera work makes this film tiring to watch.

And the many plot holes feel sloppy. This could have been such a great movie. But then again, one would hope the producers (including Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame) are smart enough that they're simply leaving room for what could easily be a money-making ream of sequels and prequels.

Filling in the plot by making this a movie series might someday land District 9 a higher ranking than:
*** out of ***** stars

An Inside Look at Pittsburgh?

As a huge Pittsburgh Steelers' football fan, I was a little letdown by the lack of a single Black-and-Gold reference in 2008's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. But beyond that, this is a pretty good little indie film.

Based on a 1988 novel by Michael Chabon, who's related to a couple of good friends from my condo building, it's the coming-of-age story of Art Bechstein (played by the unknown and handsome Jon Foster). As he prepares for a finance job furnished by his mobster dad (a solid and surprisingly ungrizzled Nick Nolte), he spends his last youthful summer getting mixed up with a mysterious couple played by the always-great (and born at Scott Air Force Base, a few miles from my hometown in Illinois) Peter Sarsgaard and Sienna Miller (who gossiper Perez Hilton always refers to as Slutienna Miller). While Art starts to fall for Sienna's character, he's at least subconsciously trying to ditch his psychotic, dumb, nympho "girlfriend" Phlox, played humorously by Mena Suvari.

There may not be a lot of Pittsburgh in the movie, but there sure are a lot of twists and romantic entanglements. Worth a watch.

*** out ***** stars

Crowded House: Day 2 at Pitchfork Music Festival

As Pitchfork began to hit its stride in Day 2, it really became about the communal experience as much as the music. (I'm guessing because I wasn't there, but I did attend the first Pitchfork in 2006, with Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, and Os Mutantes, so I'm not totally shooting in the dark.)

Perhaps that's why Francis Chung's photography highlighted lots of fandom on this day. My good friend caught plenty of people have a good time in the summer Chicago heat.

These two photos on the right are my favorites. You've got maniacal fandom in one and content overpriced-beer-buyer in the other.

Check out all his Day 2 photos here, my blog post about Day 1 here, and I'll be back soon with a Day 3 photog report.

Robert Novak, Centralia Holiday Tournament, Sports Reporting, and Me

Robert Novak died the other day. I always despised this D.C. talking bobble-head, but now that he's officially been silenced, it seems like a fitting time to mark the occasion by reading as much of his book, Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, as humanly possible. Here are a couple of highlights from the early pages ...

I didn't really care to hear Novak's side of one of his most defining moments, the mid-2000s Valerie Plame CIA scandal. He goes on for several pages making excuses for becoming a central figure in the saga. Playing onto this drama, Novak says his close relationship with the evil Wizard of Oz Karl Rove was "built on self-interest, [which is] the rule in high-level Washington journalism, though journalists seldom are as candid about [this] as I will be throughout this book."

But I have to admit, Novak's writing is pretty snappy when he kicks into chronological autobiography mode. Perhaps I was enjoying the book because his early career paralleled my own quite a bit. He started out as a sports writer because he couldn't play any sports well himself (I was pretty good at soccer, tennis, and baseball, on the other hand). He even mentions the Centralia (Illinois) High School Holiday Tournament, which I covered for the Centralia Morning Sentinel for two years in the mid-1990s.

As a sports reporter at the University of Illinois' paper, he got his first taste of politics when he was beat out of becoming sports editor. "It taught me that politics for me was a lot like sports. I was a lot better reporting it than practicing it. I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like. No stirrer-up of strife is ever very popular." Again reminding me of my sometimes-toxic-to-the-locals writing in Centralia.

Novak got his first breaks working at the Omaha and Indianapolis bureaus of the Associated Press before being assigned to Washington D.C. in 1957, with the goal of breaking stories "nobody else had and explaining what was really happening behind the scenes." Political reporting, he says, "took more elbow grease and chicanery than cerebral brilliance." He got many scoops simply because he was single and hung out with lobbyists, legislative staffers, and secretaries, while many other journalists along his route were married and home in bed.

The writer goes into his formative ideology by noting how ineffective politicians are and his disdain for organized labor unions. He also discusses the differences between Washington D.C. in 1957 and now (then it had a sex zone on 9th Street, no "New York-syle posh restaurants," and a powerful men's-only hangout in the National Press Club).

Seems like a surprisingly good read if you want to figure out how the right-sided Beltway-journalist mind works. Definitely a mystery worth trying to unlock ...