I’ve been a fan of Elton John and his music since the mid-70s. I’ve seen him in concert numerous times (the first and most memorable was at Wembley Stadium in June 1984) and his music has been the soundtrack to much of my life. So, when my buddy Stephen Spignesi asked if I would be interested in contributing an essay to his book Elton John: Fifty Years On The Complete Guide to the Musical Genius of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, I said yes without hesitation.
The book, co-written with Michael Lewis, is now out and is available anywhere books and eBooks are sold, including at Amazon. My entry is called “This Essay Has No Title (Just Words and a Soundtrack)” after the similarly titled song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
On Monday, October 21 at 6:30pm, I will join editor Michael Bracken and fellow contributors Chuck Brownman, James A. Hearn, Scott Montgomery, Graham Powell, William Dylan Powell, and Mark Troy at Murder by the Book in Houston to sign and discuss the collection The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods. My PI story is called “The Patience of Kane.”
Last time, I wrote about my “accidental novel,” and I have made a lot of headway on the book since then. After gutting it to remove numerous chapters from ancillary characters’ points of view and salvaging the important material in them by representing them from the points of view of one of the three surviving POV characters, I rebuilt the book a chapter at a time and completely rewrote the final third. I now have a 70,000 word second draft that I will revise over the next couple of weeks before testing it out on a couple of beta readers and my agent. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this book. One thing I discovered, though, upon rewriting is how much has changed in Galveston since 2006-7, when I wrote the first draft. How many businesses are no longer there, thanks to a couple of hurricanes, for example.
We watched a few interesting movies last weekend before having a turkey dinner to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving. First, we watched El Camino, the new Breaking Bad film. It moves Jesse Pinkman’s story further down the road, but it doesn’t reveal anything new about him. A number of flashback scenes allow other familiar (some deceased) characters to have a second bow. A couple of scenes go on a little too long. On the whole, it’s an interesting film, but I’m not sure it was a necessary film.
Then we watched the 2019 Shaft movie on a lark, expecting a popcorn movie and getting just that. It’s a throwback with serious dollops of misogyny and homophobia blended into its kick-ass action scenes. Fun, but if you scrutinize it too closely you realize just how ill conceived it was.
Finally, we stumbled upon a documentary called Cold Case Hammarskjöld, in which a couple of Swedes try to get to the bottom of the mysterious death of the United Nations Secretary General in 1961. His plane went down in the Congo and there have long been rumors he may have been assassinated. This daring duo spent years following leads, interviewing people, visiting the various scenes, getting mired in (possibly) conspiracy theories involving a secret mercenary organization in South Africa that may have been funded by MI6 or the CIA to destabilize African nations. It is presented in part by having the director/writer narrate the script to two different stenographers (even he admits he’s not sure why he did that). It all seems very amateur-hour/seat of the pants until at the very end they stumble upon two vast troves of information–one a person and the other a set of old records–that essentially break the story wide open. It’s a quirky film that requires some patience (it feels very long), but fascinating.
