RIP, Mary Stewart – And Thanks For All the Novels

17. May 2014 · Comments Off on RIP, Mary Stewart – And Thanks For All the Novels · Categories: Memoir, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: ,

From the temple of Poseidon at Sunion, Greece

From the temple of Poseidon at Sunion, Greece

I see from a link from a Facebook friend that author Mary Steward has passed on to that great and ultimate publisher in the sky. (Facebook links and Twitter posts – I swear, this is how we find out news of a relatively minor nature these days.) She was well into her nineties, and the books that were her mega-popular best-sellers were all from several decades ago. (Including The Crystal Cave – the first of a five-novel retelling of the Arthurian cycle; these are the ones which most readers remember.) I, on the other hand, remember finding, reading and adoring her earlier books – the romantic-suspense-mystery ones. Yes, because they not the least bit risqué, no bad language or anything more sexually-explicit than a fond kiss or a close and comforting embrace – I recollect that I first encountered them in the library when I was middle-school age and no one burst any blood vessels over me reading them. I might even have read them first in the Mount Gleason Junior High library, at that – since the movie that Disney had made from The Moonspinners was shown in the school theater over summer. Although I was a bit disappointed when I looked up the book and read it after seeing the movie. Everything was different, just about! But for the setting and … well, the setting; I did get to appreciate the books, later on – as the memory of the movie faded. Especially those of her books with a setting in Greece; My Brother Michael, (Delphi and environs) and This Rough Magic (Corfu), especially … and then I had a soft spot for her very first book, Madam, Will You Talk? – which was set in southern France. I never did get to check out Corfu – but I did visit Athens and Delphi – and Provence, as well – motivated in large part because of the beautiful way that she had of establishing a place and the character of it.
Never mind about the romance and all … dumpy and rather plain fifteen-year-olds, cursed with glasses and metal braces – still have a wistful affection for romance. Even if the prospective hero is at first meeting grumpy and impatient – even slightly mysterious. Someday, my fifteen-year old self hoped – I would go to Greece, or the South of France, although the romance part was perhaps a little bit too much to hope for.

And I did – but that is another story. At any rate, she and Rosemary Sutcliffe were among the first writers that I came back to, over and over – because of the way that they wrote about a place; every leaf and tree and flower of it. I would like to think that I have taken some lessons from them, or at least had their very good example before me when I began to write about specific places.

Continued Assorted Musings on Upstairs, Downstairs

16. May 2014 · Comments Off on Continued Assorted Musings on Upstairs, Downstairs · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , ,

We have carried on with watching Upstairs, Downstairs – warming up to it every evening with a half-hour palate cleanser of Blandings … which reminds me, I must steer my daughter towards those copies of PG Wodehouse which I have on the shelves, and my volume of the collected works of Saki, otherwise HH Munro … a writer of short stories only equal in my estimation to Rudyard Kipling … whose collections I also have on the shelves. Yes, HH Munro died in WWI, and so did Kipling’s only son, John. One was in his forties and over-aged for the military combat duties, the other seventeen and a trifle young for it … but they both rushed to join the forces, such was the tone of the time. (Munro turned down a commission and served in the ranks, John Kipling’s influential father wrangled his near-sighted son a commission in the Irish Guards.)

This once-proud and forward-thinking world and it’s brutal disillusion is reflected in the current series of Upstairs, Downstairs – first, the tenor of the time, of optimistic patriotism, outrage at German brutality in Belgium and France, the honestly-felt obligation to serve King and country … and then shading into war-weariness and despair, as the casualties mounted, up and up and up. England, France, Germany and Russia were gutted of a whole generation of men – some time in college (or maybe it was a grad school course) there was reason in one of my textbooks for a couple of tables of statistics for males by age in certain Western European countries. There was a considerable divot when it came to the male population of certain countries who would have been of an age to serve in WWI. That was statistics on a page; brought home now and again by the local war memorials in various towns all across Britain, France and Germany – a small stone obelisk in a corner of the town square, or a panel let into the side of a wall, with fifteen or twenty names on it. Heartbreakingly – especially in smaller places – there would be a couple or three identical surnames. Brothers, fathers and sons, cousins … the only wartime losses in the US to equal the English toll in WWI had happened fifty years before, in the Civil War, when local companies went down in sheaves like wheat under the scythe, in a storm of shot where the minie balls came down like hail, and there went just all about the fit men of age from some small town in Illinois, or Virginia, Vermont or Ohio, in some contested field – a sunken road, a wheat-field, a peach orchard or an angle of trench.

In Upstairs, Downstairs, this carnage all happens off-stage. It was a television program after all – and even if by Season Four it was a winner in the popularity stakes, additional budget largess went to more scenes set on location, rather than the studio set, and rather better costuming for the female characters. I have not noticed so many eye-blindingly awful selections with obvious zippers up the back as there were in the first two seasons. It is telling, though – that the fashion for rather more practical and shorter skirts for every-day wear is quite obvious, although the older generation, exemplified by Lady Pru resolutely keeps to toe-length, and Mrs. Bridges holds on to the old-style of dress, apron and cap. The sun will never set on Mrs. Bridges in a hair-net and a knee-length dress.

James is a total and self-centered jerk … but there must have been something to him, else why would Hazel ever have seen something to him, and stuck around? Perhaps she was just out of her mind for a couple of months in 1912 or so. Poor Rose missed her chance of domestic happiness – kick and scream as she must, she’ll be the rest of her life in service. Hudson still holds up his end – although as blind as a bat himself, he had a go at volunteering for the Army. And there we stand, with four or five more episodes and the final season – the one which I never actually saw, since I was in the military myself and overseas when it aired on PBS the first time around.

Upstairs, Downstairs – Original Version Revisited

21. April 2014 · Comments Off on Upstairs, Downstairs – Original Version Revisited · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

OK – so, since we are now almost a year into giving the heave-ho to cable TV, and busily exploring the delights available through Hulu/Amazon Prime/Acorn, I took it into my head that I should like to watch the original Upstairs, Downstairs series. The very first season of this, which aired on Masterpiece Theater when it was hosted by Alistair Cooke, was seriously truncated when it showed on PBS … which was when I was in college, umpty-umph years ago. Not only did I miss seeing most of the first season, but I also missed absolutely all of the last season,  through having enlisted in the Air Force and promptly been assigned overseas. That was the season which romped through the post WWI decade. Very likely I missed other episodes throughout the run of the program. Although I regretted this, I have always declined to spend however much it would cost to buy the entire series of Upstairs, Downstairs, no matter how much I wanted to watch it and no matter how much it is marked down through Amazon specials, or considered in comparison to How Much It Would Have Cost When First Made Available. (Yes, I laid out an ungodly sum of money for the VHS set of Jewel In The Crown, which I watched again and again and thoroughly enjoyed, but never again shall I spend more than I did then for a costume mini-series. So, bite me, vendors of classic TV series – I will wait and wait and wait until the ones that I want are available in slightly-used DVD editions. Or on streaming internet … yes, where was I? Oh – Upstairs, Downstairs.)

First off, my daughter says that she hopes that producers, writers and show-runners for Downton Abbey are paying a mint, or at least giving the original producers miles and miles of artistic credit and acknowledgements. Downton has re-used sooooo many characters and situations. They’re probably in public domain these days, though – so never mind.

Yes, it is screamingly obvious that the first season was produced on the cheap – and very obviously on a set; outdoor shots were at a bare, bare, bare and almost daily soap-opera minimum. My daughter even noticed the walls shivering slightly, whenever a door slams. Outdoor scenes only begin occurring in the second season, wherein Miss Lizzie’s marriage is turning to dust and ashes. There’s a lot more indoor-to-outdoor scenes at that point; obviously there’s more in the budget, and the producers pretty much established the cast below-stairs that would carry on for the next four.

But dear god – what they had to do for the female leads’ costumes. Not so much for downstairs; plain black or pastel-colored long-sleeved dresses with elaborate aprons – hard to mess up the working costumes of the female working class way back then. Their get-up was obviously uniform and practical. But for Upstairs, they obviously, went into some vast internal closet for long dresses that at a squint appeared vaguely Edwardian. A good few of Lady Marjorie’s costumes look as if the costume department had cornered a herd of wild 1960s upholstered furniture, slaughtered them whole-sale, skinned them, and made her dresses from their pelts.  It’s bad. How bad? I frequently spotted my own particular bête noir when it comes to period pieces; obvious zippers up the back. No – in my admittedly less than expert study of female costume, circa 18th-19th-early 20th centuries … zippers did most emphatically not figure. They fastened in just about every other way and in every other place than a zipper up the center-back seam. Trust me, when I tell you this. Let this particular book – Nancy Bradfield’s Costume in Detail be a guide, should you wish further enlightenment.  I leaned on it rather heavily, in working out Lady Isobel’s wardrobe in Quivera Trail; my own take on the perils and challenges of Upstairs and Downstairs. Otherwise – I am enjoying renewing my acquaintance with the series, and if memory serves, the latter seasons did get very much better as popularity of the series grew.

Off and Away

14. January 2014 · 6 comments · Categories: Book Event, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

Well, after procrastinating for a good few weeks, scribbling another Lone Star Sons adventure, and playing around with photoshopping a cover for another collection of essays, I got started on The Golden Road – this will be the picaresque California Gold Rush adventure that I always wanted to write. In The Adelsverein Trilogy it was alluded several times that Fredi Steinmetz had gone to California with a herd of cattle …who knew that cattle had been taken over the southern route from Texas to San Diego in the mid-1850s to supply the gold mines? I didn’t, until I read of it in The Trail Drivers of Texas. Anyway, it’s mentioned casually a couple of times that he knocked around the gold mines for a bit and then wandered home again.

So – in keeping with my plan to continue exploring the western Barsetshire, and write the adventures of various minor characters as they star in their own book – this is Fredi’s turn to cut loose. And the venue – California at the heights of the Gold Rush is also a pretty wild and woolly scene, with all kinds of interesting, eccentric, and later-to-become famous characters wandering around … here goes. It is in my grand plan to make this my book for November, 2015. It seems to take me about two years to research and write (sometimes simultaneously, as I have a wonderful idea for a plot twist, and then have to hurry to the reference materials to see if that twist is even historically possible.)

I wrote the first draft of To Truckee’s Trail in a white-hot blaze of energy over the space of three months – but then, that was a book that I had been thinking about for years, and limited as to space and time. The Trilogy did take only two years – but that was essentially one humongous story, later sliced into three helpings. The other books – all seemed to fall together at one or two years, from start to final edit, even when I was working on some of them simultaneously. There are authors who can spin out a book a year, but … those always seemed to me to be a bit mechanical, and the books produced were nothing that any but the most devoted fans could fall upon with happy cries of joy. The authors who take two years, or even three years – well, the work is most usually worth the wait. And yes, this schedule has been kicked around in writer discussion groups for as long as I have been paying attention to them. So – herewith begins the new adventure – and I will, as usual, post the occasional sample chapter, as they are written.

Hurray for Hollywierd!

13. January 2014 · Comments Off on Hurray for Hollywierd! · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

One of the underappreciated sidelights of having grown up in Southern California was seeing bits and pieces of it masquerading (sometimes quite unconvincingly) as someplace else on TV. You may know, for instance, that all those times on the original Star Trek that Kirk and Spock set down on a planet where they actually went out to a real non-studio set location, it always seemed to be an area north of the San Fernando Valley called Vasquez Rocks. The area is distinguished by all the rocks being round, from the largest boulders down to the tiniest pebble, which makes the place look quite weird and unearthly… but embarrassingly distinctive. If the location sports scrubby chaparral and all round rocks, they’ve been out to Vasquez Rocks again, no matter what the show is and what the plot calls for.

I don’t know how many times I saw the same stand of papyrus swamp at the County Arboretum standing in for some Third World pretense of a nation on Mission Impossible, which along with Fantasy Island always made good use of that ornate little white cottage with the porches all the way around. It’s the guest cottage on the old Lucky Baldwin estate, and I don’t care how big you think it looks on TV, it actually is only about the size of a two car garage, and has only four teensy bedrooms.

Other fortuitous spottings included seeing the Oviatt Library, on the campus of Cal State Northridge (a facility in which I practically lived for two years) masquerading as a Cylon installation on the original Battlestar Galactica. The Fine Arts facilities at Cal State Northridge also doubled regularly on Medical Center as (wait for it) a medical center. Stumbling over a production crew doing exterior shots was just one of the advantages of an education there. I also once spotted a corner of Foothill and Commerce in Tujunga pretending to be some little town out in the sticks in Lou Grant, and recognized it only because it was close to my bus stop. And when the 210 Freeway was being built in sections, a particular  two or three mile stretch of it through La Crescenta and Tujunga was about the last to link up with the other stretches. This made it a popular venue for chase scenes, especially for CHIPS, the notorious Erik Estrada vehicle. They would film a hell-for-leather car chase up one side of that stretch…. and in mid-chase, suddenly be going hell-for-leather in the other direction.

There were a lot of car chases inexplicably changing directions; I recall another one along Roscoe in Sun Valley, which spun into the parking lot of a large Hispanic grocery store, and went back the way it came. If you’re blocking off a goodly length of street, it only makes sense to use both sides of it, but it still gave fits of the giggles to people who knew the area. The rattle-snake ridden cottage where JP and I lived as small children was once used for a week as a location set, to the great amusement of my parents. So far out in the hills, and isolated from other houses, it made a perfect hideaway for an escaping gunman on the old Highway Patrol series… and the leftovers from the generous catered meals on the set augmented the food budget rather nicely, as Dad was in graduate school at the time. Mom and Dad said for years afterwards that the sheer amusement value of watching Broderick Crawford’s male nurse keeping him away from the alcohol more than made up for the inconvenience of lights and cameras, and having to keep quiet and out of the way.

When I began to travel, I became even more sadly aware of just how much the usual locations didn’t look anything like the places they were supposed to be: Korean hills, for instance, were jagged and steep, and bright green in summer, not rounded and dull green, as they appeared on MASH. Spotting a eucalyptus tree in what was supposed to be the Normandy countryside wrecked otherwise carefully constructed believability, just like seeing California live oak trees in the alleged mid-West. Southern California could pass convincingly as the Mediterranean, though —  given the right sort of background architecture. Greece, Southern Italy, Southern France, and Spain any place where olive trees and oleanders thrive could be duplicated in So-Cal. Provence and the Pellopponese felt halfway familiar to me on that basis; that and the propensity for brush fires.

Eventually TV producers tried harder (either that or to save money) when it came to locations. They might not have gone all the way to Alaska to do Northern Exposure, but at least they went farther than the San Fernando Valley. Audiences may be savvier, too; I am sure lots of other people recognize Vasquez Rocks, too. But there is still the thrill of recognizing a location when watching a vintage television show … most especially when it was supposed to be someplace else.

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