November 7, 2010
Psychmovies.com Good God, I'll be here for days
Welcome
Enjoy your visit!Brooke J. Cannon, Ph.D.
Marywood University
Tosches Jerry Lee Pussy via Dogmeat Whole Lotta CSE
In 1969, aged 20, Nick Tosches moved to New York and got a job doing paste-up for the Lovable Underwear company. At the same time he started writing for Fusion magazine, a remarkable Boston rock mag that also included Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman amongst its contributors. He started writing pieces for Rolling Stone and "one day in January 1972 I just went out to lunch and decided to be a writer full-time. And that's what I've been doing ever since"
His career has moved form journalism to non-fiction books to, at last, a novel. Cut Numbers, published nearly twenty years after The Godfather, deals with the end of Italian-America as a closed community, the end of the Mafia years maybe. Little Italy is no longer what it was, the numbers racket has been taken over by the Government and called Lotto, new waves of immigrants are leaner and meaner, and for Louie Brunellesches, at the age of 35, getting ahead means Wall St and and an uptown girl named Donna Lou. I asked Nick Tosches whether he intended the story to have a general resonance for Italian-Americans, "I hope it does. A lot of people have misconstrued it as simply a thriller, but to me it's the slow parts that are important. The background to the story - the whole thing about the numbers racket and all - I'd never read anything that sort of handled that well. What things I did read seemed to be on the fantasy level, say the Godfather, raher than the way I'd known it to operate all my life which is basically on a street level with characters who were not necessarily the smartest people in the world. Or the most romantic or the best dressed."
Cut Numbers has now been bought for the movies and, just as the book provides a contrast to the Godfather image of the Mafia, so should the film. The director is set to be the maverick horror auteur George Romero, who Tosches thinks could be he right man to keep intact the combination of downbeat mood with a hard edge. Though Tosches accepts that realism ay not be the way to blockbuster success; "One interesting thing about Cut Numbers, translating it to the screen everybody says the amounts of money aren't large enough. People who go to the movies want to hear about things in the millions, even though its not their money. I had actual amounts, 50,000 dollars, 100,000, but people like to dream big. So I guess to a certain extent the fantasy will always be more popular than the fact of things."
Meanwhile he's busy on a couple of other projects. One has been in the pipeline for years and should mark Tosches' last foray into non-fiction, a biography of Dean Martin, Italian -American icon and enigma; "The question at the heart of it will be who is this guy and why am I interested in him? It will also deal with the nature of showbiz, the recording industry, the movie industry and connections between organised crime and those industries. Also AMerican culture in general. He's one of the few entertainers who's had an interesting life. Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin were the only two entertainers I ever really wanted to write about."
Also on the go is a second novel: "It's called Scratch and it's the story of a rather dull, rather unsympathetic, mediocre accountant who somehow becomes interesting in the course of his own downfall amd demise. The background of the book is counterfeiting and pornography; everything takes place against those two worlds. This mild inconsequential accountant gets involved in things far greater than he is. No one knows what's at the centre till the final hand is dealt, no one knows what's real or what isn't, so the counterfeiting thing goes right through it. The pornography is just a sideline because that's the counterfeiter's legitimate activity. And, uh, a little sex never hurt a book. And that's that one. It has either the promise or the danger of being far darker than Cut Numbers but we'll see..."
We get to talking about other writers a little, and it emerges that Tosches has a somewhat unusual set of influences for a man with a lowlife fascination; "Most of what I have read and continue to read predates this century. I'm pretty much back in antiquity, I read the classics and ancient history, mediaeval history, and dabble in modern things. Most of the contemporary fiction I read doesn't grab me enough to want to consume very much. In terms of influence, most of them are back in antiquity. I don't know if that makes any sense considering the way I write. I like Thucydides, Homer, Pindar, Herodotus, Hesiod... I've always enjoyed seeing who said what first, and if the same thing has been said in 400bc and in 1964, why bother with 1964. Very rarely does a contemporary writer strike me as doing something new; that's what struck me years ago about George V.Higgins - to me that seemed so new and so good. I still don't think his importance as a writer is acknowledged."
So, turning it back round on him, I wonder why such a classical kind of guy should write about such a bunch of low-rent hoodlums: "It's like Faulkner said, you write about what you know best in settings you know best. That's pretty much the only way to go about it. You can call it crime fiction but basically, no matter if they are a priest or whatever, everybody has the same criminal elements in them. It doesn't interest people to read something they don't intuit to be part of themselves, that's why people don't really read the Lives Of The Saints."
Nick Tosches suggests a third round of cappuccinos at this point and, fearing a total caffeine overload, I wonder if it would be possible to get a beer some place instead. He pauses briefly and says sure, there's a place we could go. We head back over towards his apartment. On the way Tosches dives into a newsstand to put some money on a Lotto number. Lotto is the scheme New York State came up with to finally kill the numbers racket; basically just a legalised version. "Even though gambling is illegal, New York State is now New York's biggest bookmaker, if you can figure that out", comments Tosches.
Why my Custom Search Engines Rule the World: 1964 NORTHWOOD SCHOOL FAIR
THE 1964 NORTHWOOD SCHOOL FAIR
By the summer of 1964 I had stretched out my adolescence to the breaking point. The following summer would find me working in a warehouse in downtown Baltimore, the summer after that, boot camp in Fort Gordon, Georgia, the next summer, Long Binh, Vietnam.
Many adventures with the Northwooders were yet to come, but the summer of ‘64 was my farewell to the enchantment of the season, before the Army, work, and responsibility pushed the magic aside. Thankfully it was a great summer, maybe the best of my younger years, and it began, as every summer did, with the Northwood School fair.
The Northwood School fair was the event that marked the official beginning of summer vacation. Our school semester ended the third week in June. The school fair was always the last Saturday of that month. The contingency plan was to have it the first Saturday in July if there was a rainout, but, to my recollection, that never happened. That Saturday was always a beautiful early summer day.
The fair, with the exception of the baked goods and plant sales, took place outside at the rear of the school.
I guess you could say it was sort of a combination flea market/amusement park. Tables were set up around the school's perimeter for selling contributed items like clothes, tools, and even records. There were also stands selling hot dogs, sodas, snowballs, and cotton candy. There were pony rides and various beanbag tossing games.
The fair opened at nine o'clock, but my brother and I would get there early to help a friend's mom set up the tables. After that, we were on our own. Our group would start showing up one or two at a time during the morning hours until all were present and accounted for.
Let me say right now that it was never our intent to create mischief at the fair. We started the day in a courteous and polite fashion. But by early afternoon, after checking out all the tables, playing most of the games, and eating a couple dozen twenty five cent hot dogs, we were getting restless. Sitting on the crest of a grassy hill, watching all the action, some of us noticed a child open a rear door to the school before being scolded by his mother.
The Northwooders happened to know that door was always locked because we had often tried to enter it on weekends. We simultaneously looked at each other with the same thought in our heads...a hangout.
We raced down the incline and into the door. We found ourselves on the first floor of a stairwell. For a while, we were content to lounge around on the steps, listening to the commotion outside. But soon we tired of sitting and talking and decided to explore a bit.
At the top of the stairs was another door. It too was unlocked and, to our amazement, opened up into the school gym.
We couldn't believe our luck. What started out started out as a somewhat forgettable stairwell adventure had now suddenly developed into much more. The gym had ropes hanging from the ceiling and tied down to the walls. An assortment of balls littered the floor from small dodge balls to huge medicine balls. A large piano occupied one corner of the facility.
I'm not sure to this day the purpose of a piano in a gym. It was an elementary school so maybe the kids climbed ropes to Beethoven or Mozart. At the time nobody paid it much mind. The ropes held most of our attention.
Once untied, we began to swing around the room with wild abandon. It was such a unique thrill to have a fully functional gymnasium to ourselves that one of us went outside to spread the word.
Soon the gym was filled with young guys taking advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity. All the ropes were being used by at least one boy. Some had two or three hanging from them. Balls of all sizes flew about the room, some aimed at the swingers, others at the walls and ceiling.
At some point it was decided that the piano would make a good launching pad for the ropes. It was rolled out to the center of the gym and while one talented young man played a medley of Jerry Lee Lewis standards, others jumped off its surface, swinging out on their improvised Tarzan swings.
It was around this time that we realized our shouts, yells, and an off-key rendition of 'Great Balls Of Fire' had drawn the attention of a few adults. We saw them crowded outside the door that led to a school hallway. Fortunately for us, that door was locked from the inside.
They were trying desperately to get in. From the door's small glass opening we could see their mouths moving frantically, but the din in the room prevented us from hearing their words. One woman in particular seemed in obvious distress. Every time a guy would mount the piano she would open her mouth wide in what looked like a scream, but, as I said, we couldn't hear her.
Then it appeared that a light bulb was turned on simultaneously over their heads. They had figured out our point of entry.
As fun as this was, no one really wanted our day to end being brought home by the cops.
We took off in a flash, at least thirty of us, leaping down the stairwell and out the door. Adults outside scattered to avoid being trampled by the onslaught. It was several seconds of sheer chaos.
Most of the guys mixed into the crowd, heavy panting the only obvious sign of their shenanigans. The Northwooders headed back up the hill in time to see several quite angry adults enter our former hangout.
The remainder of the day was a rather normal affair. A couple of us were kicked out of the plant room after a shoving match knocked over some azaleas. One of the Northwooders took a pony ride when he thought we weren't looking. But we saw him and gave him grief throughout the summer. But mostly we ate hot dogs and cotton candy and talked about how we'd spend the rest of our vacation.
I can't remember how many more years the Northwood School fair continued. It wasn't many. Despite our occasional ill behavior, the fair was a unique social event that defined the innocence of the sixties. And like many memories from that time, it was irreplaceable.
Oh by the way, we tested that door many times during the course of the summer, but it was always tightly locked.
