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.

Looking to Spring

06. January 2014 · Comments Off on Looking to Spring · Categories: Book Event, Random Book and Media Musings, Uncategorized · Tags: ,

My author tableWell, I have been in colder places in my time, and places were it got colder longer, but most of them involved show, and shoveling massive amounts of it … or that year in Greenland, thirty miles north of the Arctic circle, which didn’t have all that much show, but was dark as the bottom of a coal mine for all the days of the winter months. I can handle temps in the teens and twenties very well, thank you, but I think I had better get out that Eddie Bauer parka, the insulated gloves, woolen hat and the warm scarf to wear when walking the dogs tomorrow.

So, the month-long holiday hurdles have been negotiated successfully, the turkey leftovers finally disposed of, the Christmas lights and ornaments all taken down – and here I am ready to face the New Year. As far as book events go, the biggie is the San Antonio Book Festival in early April. Watercress Press is going to have a booth in the exhibitor’s hall, and as one of their authors, I’ll be there. It’s only the second time the SA Public Library foundation has done this kind of thing so there is something to be said for getting in on a lower floor. And Watercress has been around for thirty years in San Antonio; one would think that a bit of respect for seniority would be due.

I’m rather looking forward to it, since I have been trying to gin up interest in my own books in San Antonio. I love the Hill Country, and I’ll go anywhere within reason to do a book event, but with the cost of a tank of gas, and considering the needs of the dogs, it would be fantastic to do a book talk within a fifteen or twenty minute ride of the house. Weirdly, the books seem more popular practically anywhere other than the place they were written – and in the case of The Quivera Trail, the location where they were set. For a while, The Adelsverein Trilogy was on sale in the bookshop at the Texas Institute of Cultures, but that was about as good as it got. Readers have also suggested  the Texas Book Festival – I’d be eligible to exhibit there as an indy author, but last time I looked into it, the costs for a booth there was way out of what I could pay – and again, there is that long drive involved.

But I am going to club together with my daughter’s Tiny Artistic Bidness, Paper Blossom Productions for a couple of market events; the spring market in Helotes for certain, and another in Bulverde possibly. I’ll post more on all of this as soon as we know for certain.

Spoiled for the Movie

26. December 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

I’ve written now and again of how I’ve been spoiled when it comes to watching movies set in the 19th century American west – also known as Westerns – by my own knowledge of the setting and time. Yes, if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of it is like the Tunguska Explosion, with pretty much the same results – even if the movie in question is one of those high-cost, well-acted, beautifully filmed award-winning extravaganzas.

The latest movie which has been destroyed for me is Dances With Wolves – which we decided to watch the other night. Beautiful-looking movie, scenic panoramic sweeps of the Northern Plains, attractive and interesting actors – especially those portraying Sioux – and as for the look and conduct of the tribe as portrayed? I’ve always thought there was nothing better for getting an idea of what a Sioux village and it’s inhabitants looked like in the mid-19th century. No, really – it was marvelous, almost a living history exhibit; everyone was always doing something; working, recreating, celebrating. Alas – everything else about Dances just falls apart on closer examination.

What was the purpose of Fort Sedgwick, abandoned out in the middle of the plains? US Army forts were established along the overland trail to serve a purpose – protecting commercial and emigrant traffic, mostly. An army post just sitting out there with no mission, off and away off the beaten track? Logical fail number one. During the Civil War, protecting traffic and communications between the Far West and the North was of prime concern – especially since the more hostile western tribes realized that the pickings were good with the Federal Army withdrawn from all but a few strategic posts. I should note that the Pawnee, as farmers who did some buffalo hunting on the side, were also long-time foes of the Sioux. But they had been pretty well decimated by epidemics and warfare with the Sioux well before the Civil War even began. The Pawnee were still fighting the Sioux, though … being recruited from their Reservation to serve as US Army scouts, and they were not bopping around the Northern plains attacking Army teamsters, either. Logical fail number two.

Logical fail number three is that by the 1860s, it just isn’t historically credible for an Army officer to ‘go native’, as it were, and join an Indian tribe. Hostilities between the various tribes and the whites had gone too far by then; there was too much bad blood on the ground and ill-feeling in the air. I will concede that it certainly could have happened at an earlier stage, depending on the tribe and the eccentricity of the individual, and the battle lines not so firmly drawn. The early mountain men cheerfully and openly joined various friendly tribes, and certainly other men whose work or wanderlust led them into the trans-Mississippi west during the 1830s and 1840s would have been likely candidates for adoption as adults into a tribe.

Given my urge to try and tinker with a narrative like this in order to ‘fix’ these and other inconsistencies, I looked at Dances and thought about how I would have tweaked it and made the story historically consistent. It could have been done quite easily by making Lt. Dunbar a traumatized survivor of the Mexican-American War – which would move the story back in time almost twenty years, to when there were just a handful of American outposts in the Far west. Give him an assignment to survey a portion of land which the Americans had won from Mexico – and there were a number of surveying and exploring missions going on at that time. Get him separated from the rest of his group, and stranded in the wilderness … and play out the rest of it as written. This strategy might not have resulted in a better book or movie – but it certainly would have satisfied me.

In Memoriam and Missed Chances

04. December 2013 · Comments Off on In Memoriam and Missed Chances · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , , , ,

Well, it’s my fault that I didn’t know about the death of T.R. Fehrenbach until last night, when one of the ladies in my Red Hat circle mentioned it. She ventured something about a historian and editorial writer for the local newspaper, whose name was something like “fehren” who had died several days before, and the obituary was in yesterday’s paper. Was he someone that I knew, since I write historical fiction? I asked her if the name was Fehrenbach and she said yes – and would I please pronounce it again.

My fault – I cancelled my subscription years ago, upon realizing that just about everything but strictly local news I had already read on-line and days before it appeared in the rapidly-diminishing pages of the San Antonio Express News. So – I did a quick googlectomy and yes, it was true. T.R. Fehrenbach had a long life and a well-spent one, to outward appearance, and a goodly number of books on ranging wide over matters historical, and readable enough to be outstandingly popular with that portion of the reading public with a passing interest in history and no urge to go wading through the murky swamps of strictly specialist academic historians. No, like Bruce Catton, or Barbara Tuchman – he was erudite and a pleasure to read. Such writers come along rarely enough. I think the greatest service they do, besides enlarging general historical knowledge, is that they get other people interested in history; passionately and deeply interested in it.

When I first began mapping out the general outline of my first books set in Texas, I bought a copy of Lone Star – from Half Price Books, of course. Later on someone recommended his Comanches – The History of a People. By then I had also branched out to other local historians for book-fodder; Scott Zesch, Alvin Josephy, Brownson Malsch, S.C. Gwynne, William C. Davis, J. Frank Dobie, Stephen Hardin and primary sources without number. I do regret that I was never able to meet Mr. Fehrenbach personally, although I have several friends who did, over the years. San Antonio is a small town in a lot of ways, and writers – even just people – pursuing the same interests tend to fetch up in the same circles or at the same events.
I would have liked to thank him. Ah, well – I also missed out on meeting Elmer Kelton, a few years ago. Mr. Kelton was supposed to the the big-name guest author at the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene, a few years ago. And when I was sixteen, I nearly had a chance to meet the founder of Girl Scouting, Olave Badon-Powell, but that fell through as well.

Revisiting Barsetshire

28. November 2013 · Comments Off on Revisiting Barsetshire · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: ,

350px-BarsetshireNot so much the 19th century Barsetshire of Anthony Trollope, but the 20th century version; a cycle of interlinked novels by Angela Thirkell, which were sort of chronological in that they were contemporary to the time that they were published – about one a year – between 1933 and her death in 1961. The books were part gentle social comedy, part romance and totally English. The novels were set in a mythical English county, and featured a huge cast of characters, a dozen or more families, houses grand and humble and several small towns. In passing, the books also chronicled those wrenching changes wrought by WWII and its gray aftermath. Quite frequently, a character, or a set of characters that would be front and center in one or two books, would retreat to the sidelines in another, while another character or family – mentioned in passing previously – would be the leading lights in the next. And it was not necessary to read every book in strict chronological order to know what was going on in Barsetshire, although it was obvious that the society which the books reflected had changed substantially from the relatively serene 1930s, to the wartime 1940s and into the uneasy peacetime which followed on it. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you could pretty much dip in anywhere and enjoy.

Some years ago, when I was blogging fretfully about how the research material I had reviewed for writing Adelsverein was leading me inexorably towards making it into more than just one book, a long-time blog fan just advised me to think of it all as Barsetshire with cypress trees and a lot of sidearms – let it rip and make it into two or three volumes. After thinking it over, I realized he was entirely right. And when I mapped out more novels set in Texas, before, during and after the events chronicled in the Trilogy, I realized that this was a most excellent way to think of those books of mine set in Texas; not as a straight start to finish ladder of a narrative, but more like an interlinked network – like Thirkell’s Barsetshire. People and characters change, over time; they have experiences, grow older and settle down, or they move off into something else. I simply couldn’t write the same character over and over again, as if nothing about them had been changed by experience and time. I was already doing this in the Trilogy – by the time of the last volume, The Harvesting, quite a lot of the narrative load was being carried by characters who had been babies or small children in the first two volumes. And there were so many characters whose experiences and back-stories I wanted to explore … really, The Harvesting was nearly twice the page-count as The Gathering, and if I gone down all those entrancing side-corridors, it might have been three times longer still.

So, some of those interesting characters demanded their own books – Margaret Becker, of course – who knew everyone who was everyone, and had a very interesting life of her own, while her brother was off adventuring on the far frontier. And with The Quivera Trail, there is Dolph Becker’s English bride – and Sam Becker’s as well. In the next book, Fredi Steinmetz’s adventures in Gold Rush California and on the various western trails will fill in his own interesting frontier experience. As I look over it all – good googly moogly, have I written six books already about these people and their web of kin, friends and associates? There are so many more at-present-minor characters begging for attention. A reader once wondered wistfully, why didn’t I do something about Willi Richter and his long sojourn among the Comanche? Then, what about little silent Grete, his sister who was retrieved after a year with them? There must be interesting material enough about Tom Becker, the Bandera Kid, who was born in a London slum under the name of Alf Trotter – but at the end of The Quivera Trail, he is a silent movie cowboy star. Surely, there is a fascinating story in that – and in Peter Vining’s brother Jamie; a small child in Deep in the Heart, and dead in Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg two books later. Little Horrie, Margaret’s grandson, a small child in the two books about Margaret, a teenager briefly mentioned in Quivera – what about him? And there is yet another thread – the daughter, or possibly the granddaughter of Race Vining’s Boston wife, coming to Texas by chance and discovering the skeleton in the familial closet?

No, not a ladder – but a net, drawing in all the various stories in our American history, in our past. And there are more of them to be told. Just wait.

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