Marcella

As frequent readers may know, my wife and I are fans of TV series where psychotic serial killers are pursued by dysfunctional detectives. So to get ready for Season 2 of “Marcella” (Netflix), we decided to re-watch Season 1, most of which we’d forgotten, including initially that we’d even seen it. Anyway, we recalled who the killer was and, pretty much, who would get killed when, so we could watch fairly dispassionately, which made us aware of certain plot holes. Maybe someone can fill them.

(I’ll pause for a moment, with a SPOILERS ALERT, to allow some of you to stop reading, if you wish.)

Okay?

1. Why. when. how did Marcella move Grace’s body? Episode 2 ends with Grace letting her in. Episode 3 begins with Marcella, post fugue state, back home, covered in mud and dirt., so she clearly did this. Did she return to Grace’s and find her dead and think she had killed her? Why did she go back? Was the killer inside when she arrived, and did he knock Marcella out, so she awoke and found the body? Why didn’t he kill Marcella?

2. Who killed the cab driver? Ostensibly, he was killed because he had seen someone move Grace’s body, but the killer knew that wasn’t him. Did Marcella kill him? Also, he seems to have been killed by a gunshot through his windshield, but I don’t recall seeing a gun in the entire show. Was he just a victim of random violence?

3. What happened to his brother after he knocked out Marcella/

4. Did Stew get away with his murder (and Jason with aiding and abetting him)?

Still, a good show.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 107

No sales.
The check from Massachusetts for “Best Ride” did not arrive.
The son of the West Catholic alum did not return to the café.
The camp/high school-connected fellow did not write or call.
But I received a “Thank you” e-mail from the West Philly photographer to whom I’d sent a “Cheesesteak.”

In other news…
When Adele’s brother called, I told him we would self-publish “Heart.” “Spruce Hill Press.”
“Moose Hill?” he said.
“Not ‘Moose Hill.’” I said. “Spruce Hill.”
“Goose Hill?” he said.
“Not ‘Goose Hill.’” He was on speaker phone and Adele was in hysterics. “Spruce Hill.”
I figure our list has not yet made us a household name, like Random House.

Third Reading

Reading three at the Vanne Café seemed, by most measures, a success.
When Adele and I arrived, four customers were on site. Three departed before the event began; one stayed – and fell asleep.
The reading drew a couple dozen people, not counting the late arrival wrapped in a parka, carrying his possessions in a giant Target plastic bag and a carton previously used to ship raspberries, who commandeered a back sofa for himself. Two attendees were café regulars, who’d been to both previous readings; a woman, who’d come to mine, returned with two freinds; one of the readers drew five friends and/or relatives; and the other the rest. The mike was again a problem for we are mechanically challenged to begin with, but the hook-up for viewing illustrations on the café’s flat screen wall TV was a success. Both readers sold copies of their books; the pricey beer and wine moved; and the barrista’s tips were ample.
I guess the sexual content of the readings raised eyebrows – particularly on the adult daughters of Reader One – but I heard plenty laughs and saw many smiles. If I’ve learned one thing from these readings, including my own, it is that writers seem to think more highly of their words than do those hearing them. Audience attention spans are limitied. Less is more.
My co-promoter suggests we have a pianist lightly cue people when to leave the stage.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 106

No sales but…
A reader in Massachusetts writes that he liked “Cheesesteak” so much he is ready to buy a “Best Ride.” To whom should he write his check? (Answer: “Bob Levin” or “Spruce Hill Press” will do.)
And the fellow in Philly, linked to me through high school and summer camp (See: “Adventures in Marketing” supra) was so pleased by the “Cheesesteak” I sent him, he offered to pay for it. I declined, but added, “However, if you care to send a present to friends…”
Finally, just as I was leaving the café yesterday, a guy in his 40s came by my table and picked up a “Cheesesteak.”.
“Are you from Philadelphia?” I said.
Until he was 10. Then his family moved to Ocean City. His father went to West Catholic and his mother to Hallahan.
“You’re a little young,” I said, “but they’ll love it.
He promised he’d be back to buy one.

In other news, the editor in NYC who’d had “Heart,” Adele’s and my jointly written account (care giver and patient) of our adventures in cardiovascular-land, concluded “the close details of event, diagnosis, cure and treatment… didn’t leave enough room for readers to put themselves inside the story.” Her reaction to content was refreshing, since we’d grown accustomed to simply being rejected for our lack of a sufficient “platform. But since the last editor to read the m.s. had felt anything outside the medical detracted from our core story, we didn’t feel helped appreciably.
We will self-publish.

Adventures in Marketing: Weeks 104-05

Sold one Schiz.
The buyer was a middle-aged, keeps-to-himself-at-the-cafe mathematician. He said he’d bought a Cheesesteak, but, to tell you the truth, I’d forgotten. I’m still not sure I believe him. Maybe he wanted a cover story to justify picking up something as trigger-jerking as this one. Or maybe I’ve benefited from my recent goodwill networking.
Safeway, next door, is coming to the end of its annual Monopoly game, and, instead of sticking to its one-ticket-per-$10-purchase policy, is handing out entire boxes. Many of these tickets come with tabs entitling the bearer to free (donuts, gravy mix, bottled water, aspirin) or discounted (bacon, paper towels, cookies) stuff, and I’ve been handing them out like Johnny Appleseed. (The game, itself, has prizes up to $1 million. Adele and I, after putting in about, oh, 50 hours, have won $5.)
Actually, my books have been moving so slowly, I’ve taken a more aggressive approach at expanding my name-recognition. For instance, a fellow in Philly e-mailed me because he’d read my blog “Notes on Camp,” from 2014 and was now the director of the one which had taken over mine 60 years ago (He’d also graduated my high school 28 years after me) and wanted to learn more about me. So I sent him a Cheesesteak, fantasizing about the legions of ex-campers he might tout it to.
Then a friend sent me notice of an exhibit of photographs of historic West Philadelphia at a gallery at 40th and Walnut, a half-block from an apartment he and I’d shared 1964-5. I e-mailed the photographer offering a Cheesesteak, imagining he might want to incorporate a stack of them as an installation and/or sell them on consignment at the gift shop. He ignored me, but I sent him a copy anyway.
Stay tuned.

Weighty Tomes ii

Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood on the Water,” a history of the rebellion at Attica Prison in 1971 holds “weight” of a different nature.
Thompson is a dogged researcher, who unearthed condemnatory material which the State of New York had buried for decades – and reburied after her discovery. She is also a committed partisan, who does not hide behind “objectivity” to keep the conclusions she has drawn from the page. In fact, she swings them like a mace. Her story is of pestilential racism, sadistic cruelty, and governmental – indeed societal – moral rot.
There were times I wished Thompson was less reliant on adverbs and adjectives, more interested in character development, more adept (especially when her narrative moves into courtrooms) at rendering scenes dramatically. But then I put these wishes aside. I thought they were motivated by a desire to see the other side to the story presented; but, really, I realized, was there another side? The one she documented was so compelling and complete.
I’ve tried to think of a single example of worse America-upon-Americans horror in the last 70 years and come up short. (According to Wikipedia, since the Civil War, Attica was topped only by a massacre of miners in the 1920s.) From Thompson’s description of the toxic conditions under which the inmates lived, through the gratuitous homicidal assault upon them, when troopers killed 33 prisoners and nine of their hostages, to the extermination-camp quality tortures inflicted upon the survivors, all blanketed by the intrigues, cover-ups, and betrayals designed to smother truth in its crib and cut justice’s throat.
Well, “justice.” After this read, one spits the word. Horror upon horror. Darkness within darkness. Maybe the worst part comes when Thompson carries her story to the present day. Blatant lies voiced by authorities and rebroadcast by the media about what Thompson terms “prisoner barbarism” at Attica fueled “an anti-civil-rights and anti-rehabilitation ethos.” Being “tough-on-crime” became as necessary to candidates for public office as deep-pocketed donors. The result has been more prisons built, people imprisoned, mandatory minimum sentences lengthened, the number of capital crimes increased. By 2000, New York state alone had six times as many people in prison as it had in 1971. And as before, inmates suffered from overcrowding, poor food, poor medical treatment, brutal treatment, with less recreational activities, fewer educational programs and increased barriers keeping them from lawyers and the courts.
One’s senses practically shut down. They run, as if, from the carving knife.

Weighty Tomes (i.)

If you are thinking of a gift for someone recovering from open heart surgery, keep in mind he would not be able to lift Chris Ware’s “Monograph” for weeks. In fact, this nearly nine-pound unbouncing baby, which stretches an unwieldy 18″ by 13″, may not make a good choice for anyone inclined to reading while lying in bed. Lose grip for an instance; you risk a pugged nose or punctured spleen.
Though none of his earlier works needed similar “Customer Warning” labels, Ware has never been overly reader friendly. Even in his formative “Acme Novelty Library” days, I often abandoned entire two-page spreads because no matter what effort I put into adjusting my bi-focals, his type size selection seemed to parachute-drop me into the most impenetrable jungles of an optometrist’s vision-testing charts.
While Ware’s characters tend to inhabit a range of human experiences available within walking distance of dismal big city apartment buildings or well-trimmed suburban lawns, and feelings generally capturable by 20 shades of gray – whine-producing self-pity, misery, and despair – his readers benefit from surprising moments of humor, tenderness and compassion and startling flights of fantasy, time-shift and surprise. The magic of creativity cause the mundane and dreary to sparkle.
Ware is also unmatched in his ability to transform the commonality of page composition into a wonderland. The tracking of his thoughts and his characters’ adventures across it becomes a fun ride of unanticipated possibilities for those of us with more boxed-in imaginations. We spin and whirl and chuckle. Once in a while, he plunks a mini-comic in the middle of a page like a prize inside Crackerjacks.

“Monograph,” a retrospective look at Ware’s life and career, takes self-deprecation for someone so honored to an almost Oh-come-off-it! level. (I mean, you think Mr. Potatohead would get a book so freaking humongous?) “Why,” he wonders, “would a writer of (Zadie Smith”s) caliber, intelligence and humanity… bother to give me the time of day.” “I awoke every day,” he writes, “with a paralyzing pain of panic, fear and death.” He notes his “overwhelming self-doubt,” “stupid” mistakes, “embarrassing words,” “stories so bad there’s no rescuing them,” and “lack of knowledge, artistic sophistication and inadequate understanding of how the world actually works.” At the same time he fills 275 pages with the drawings, comics, dolls, toys, dioramas, flip books, store signs, “New Yorker” covers, sheet music, storefront designs, sketch books, and teaching materials, works with paper, wood, canvas, clay, brass, and glass that establish him as one of the major creators of his time. He has ventured into animation, film, opera, radio, and TV. And he mentions a happy marriage, proud parenthood, and solid relationship with friends and colleagues that might be expected to ripple hope across any gloomy pond. Still, he writes, “death may be the single greatest thing that ever happens to us.”
Well, it certainly seems to be the one that lasts the longest.

For me, someone who is, as I often offer as a disclaimer to readers, “a word, not a picture person,” “Monograph” is most rewarding when Ware delineates his thinking about his choice of art form. In these passages, he shows an interest in connection, a “We’re-all-in-this” humanity, that might otherwise have been overlooked. Comics, he writes, represent “the way we remember life itself,” words and pictures occurring to us at the same time, duplicating “memory and consciousness,” “recomposing our lives from ever-decomposing pieces and stories.” “(U)ltimately, we’re all working on our own graphic novels of our lives…,” he says, “trying to understand, feel through and hopefully empathize with others as well as with ourselves.”
He seems a nice fellow. One can be glad for his success and thankful he has been able to pursue and document his vision.
Even if it might smack us on the nose

Adventures in Marketing: Week 103

No sales.
No conversations.
No remarks.

In other news…
1.) Word has reached me that a review of “The Schiz” – its first – is in the works. The prospective reviewer, an on-line pal since glory days of the nail-the-butchered-corpse-to-the-wall
TCJ Message Board, knows large chunks of my oeuvre, so his take should be fun. He promises a “Levin-style… digressing all over the maps (and sometimes uncharted waters)…” Stay tuned.
2.) The second monthly reading at the café suffered a 40% drop in attendance (25 to 15), but a good time was had by all. (Our audiences still seem composed of friends of the readers, and these two shared an overlapping pool.) The average age of the assembled was about 75 and the average complexion white. Gender was split.
One woman read from novels she’d written based on time spent living in England and on time spent sailing the South Pacific. The other read about the two years she spent living and working in a Kentucky mining town, with dialogue rendered in dialect and snatches of Appalachian folk songs a capella.
The generally expressed feeling was “What a good idea!” One veteran of the ‘60s Village Folk scene thanked me for restoring a sense of “Bohemia” to the place – a term I hadn’t heard in conversation in a while.
My main thought was, There sure are a lot of deep and interesting people at this little cafe.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 102

Sold two “Cheesesteaks,” one old, one new.
The first, the old, went to a 30-something hard-hatted construction worker from the block-wide, seven-story building UC is putting up across the street from the café. He’d checked me out a couple weeks ago and said he’d be back when he had cash on him. A man of his word. The second book, the new, went to a smiling, white-haired woman, in an unbuttoned orange shirt over a white-tee, who’d stopped by the café while visiting a friend who’d recently moved into the neighborhood.
That was the second day I’d had both “Cheesesteaks” on my table. I’d also added little, propped-up, hand-written price tags by each book to alert passers-by that this was a commercial operation, not just an art installation – and a modestly scaled one.

This Writing Life (con.)

When I begsn, the cartoonist was eager to be profiled.
But there was a delay with the magazine that was to publish it. Like three years, so far, and counting.
And when I wanted to publish it elsewhere, the editor said, “You can’t.”
And I was, “Huh? We don’t have a contract. You haven’t paid me anything.”
So he backed off, and another magazine grabbed it.
But by then the cartoonist seemed to have lost interest. At least he didn’t respond to e-mails from me or the new editor asking for art to illustrate the article.
We decided on “fair use.” I took a package – two books, two comix – and a poster inside a tube – to the USPO to send the art director outside Vancouver (WA).
The clerk looked in her magazine. “This address does not exist.”
I e-mailed the A.D. He confirmed his address. In fact, he said he was sitting in it.
I went for “Priority.” Two-day delivery.
Eleven days later, no one had it. The tracking number said, “Unable to deliver.”
I went back to the post office. Another clerk looked in his machine. “Unable to deliver,” he said.
“Well, why hasn’t it come back to me?” I said, figuring to give Fed Ex a shot.
“Sometimes the return takes a long time,” he said. He gave me an 800-number. It would connect me to the branch for the A.D.’s zip code. “They can make sure it’s not lying around there someplacde.”
Your tax dollars at work, I thought.
Meanwhile, we grabbed images off the internet.