Julia had a rough day yesterday but she is almost back to normal. Talk about an annoying stomach bug!
If you're interested in Classic Rock, check out one of my uncle Dennis' websites, devoted solely to the music he loves:
http://www.theclassicrockmusicsite.com/
It's a good site, with plenty of links to songs of excellent sound quality. And I was reminded by the site of bands and artists I really liked (and often forget that I do): Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt, Dire Straits.
Nice job!
Monday means an Author Profile and this week we will focus on
Dennis Lehane
Born: Boston, 1965.
Career: Lehane grew up and still lives in Boston, where all his fiction is set. His parents were working-class emigrants from Ireland. Lehane's passion for writing was fostered at Florida's Eckerd College (in St. Petersburg) and, later, as a grad student, at Florida International University in Miami. Before the publication of his first book, 1994's A Drink Before the War, Lehane held a number of jobs: social worker, teacher, a counselor for mentally handicapped and abused children, tractor-trailer loader, valet, limo driver, bookseller.
In 1994, he began his foray into crime writing with a series of books featuring Boston private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro: A Drink Before the War, Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), Sacred (1997), Gone, Baby, Gone (1998), and Prayers For Rain (1999).
Lehane was recognized early on as one of the finest noir writers around. His popularity really hits its peak in the early 2000s, with Mystic River (2001) and Shutter Island (2003). Both of these novels - along with Gone, Baby, Gone - were adapted into stunning, acclaimed, major Hollywood movies: Mystic River the first of them, an Oscar-winning film directed by Clint Eastwood, with laurels given to Sean Penn and Tim Robbins; Ben Affleck's gritty, forceful Gone, Baby, Gone, starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, and an Oscar-nominated Amy Ryan; Martin Scorsese's crazily intense, stormy, brilliantly-visualized Shutter Island, with a never-better Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, and Patricia Clarkson.
Lehane also was one of the writers on HBO's stunning, majestically-reviewed cult favorite The Wire (2002-2008), about the Baltimore drug scene as a seen from the perspectives of a wide array of characters. It's one of the best shows ever produced for television.
Noted Books: Mystic River, Gone, Baby Gone, Shutter Island, and 2008's epic The Given Day, set in 1918-1919 Boston, concerning race relations, Babe Ruth, the Boston Police Strike, returning WWI soldiers. It's a masterful, enthralling novel, and Lehane plans to write a few sequels to it - or, better put, continuations of the story and the storylines of the era.
Themes, Styles, Etc: Lehane grew up in an Irish neighborhood, in a loving home, but witnessed violence in his city, mostly due to racial tensions. His books are violent, intense, suspenseful. Loyalty, honor, moral ambiguity, corruption, and the duality of good-and-evil are themes that appear time and again. Boston is always a major character in his books, besides be the setting: the city's enclaves come alive, its specific, niche-y neighborhoods, the class tensions, the gentrification, the codes. His plots are usually complex buy never labyrinthine, the characters awash in all sorts of grey.
Why You Should Read Him: His novels are police procedurals that also function as moral evolutions of haunted, conflicted characters making their way through a world, a city, of entrenched violence. You feel spent after having read him, as satisfied and relieved as you would any other modern writer, be it a crime writer or an author of literary fiction. He has a great ear for dialogue and his books are well-paced and unique; he writes with care, never rushing to get his next novel out, which makes each Lehane book feel like a gift.
Lehane's influences include: Jim Thompson, William Kennedy, James T. Farrell (of the great Studs Lonigan trilogy), Donald Westlake, George Pelecanos, Pete Dexter. He is an avid reader of Entertainment Weekly and Harper's.
Books I Would Recommend: Mystic River, Shutter Island (both *****), Gone, Baby, Gone and The Given Day (both ****). Sacred (***) is good too.
Books I Want to Read: Prayers For Rain, 2010's Moonlight Mile (a follow-up to Gone, Baby, Gone) and October 2012's not-yet-released Live by Night.
Author's Website: http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/
Movie Review:
With the exception of The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl movies are never quite the abominations critics have a tendency to liken them to, and the same goes with One For the Money (2012), a harmless, bland adaptation of the first in Janet Evanovich's series of bestselling books about New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. As played by Heigl, Plum certainly has some klutzy, in-over-her-head appeal, and Heigl certainly has a gawky, pushy charisma, which makes the audience hope that if this intriguing character is revisited - Evanovich has written, to date, eighteen novels about Plum, so there must be something fans finds irresistible and durable about her - it will be in a jazzier, more exciting story than the one here, which finds Plum trying to haul in a police officer who has jumped bail after being suspected of a killing, who also happens to be the charmer who de-virginized and then rejected Plum in high school (he's played by Jason O'Mara). The movie, which is easy enough to watch without ever being particularly funny or exciting, has a goofy plot and plays out like an overextended, tacky, visually neutered episode of a USA network show, not horrible, but never very good. Filmed in some junky locations around Pittsburgh. The supporting cast isn't anything to write home about - a critique that extends to Debbie Reynolds, who plays Plum's annoying grandma.
(*1/2)
Today's soul track:
Well, it's not a soul song per se, but in honor of the death of Robin Gibb yesterday, I think it's only affair to devote today's song to him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc5oqjFsT5g
Robin sang lead on this 1968 song (from the group's album Horizontal), which was written for the group The Seekers, the Australian folk-pop group ("I'll Never Have Another You," "Georgy Girl"), who broke up before they could record it.
The Bee Gees were an underrated band, a true guilty pleasure for me. I think it's a shame that when we think of them, we think of disco, but that's all fine too because their songs from the Saturday Night Fever era and soundtrack were pretty great, no? But earlier songs by the band, including "I Started a Joke," "Words," "I've Gotta Get a Message to You," weren't half-bad either.
Images taken from the following:
http://hollywoodandfine.com/interviews/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/lehane.jpg
http://i33.fastpic.ru/big/2012/0418/14/c262e7092df352d987b7a4c7447b6b14.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/73/BeeGeesMassachusetts.jpg
Information taken from:
http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/
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