I Zebra

Yes, yes, yes there are feral zebras in California.  Yes, they really are a vestige of the bestiary William Randolph Hearst kept at San Simeon.  Introduced non-natives, definitely not “authentic” they seemed the perfect enemy of the non-native grapes Elliot was cultivating.  And there was the Orson Welles connection, Citizen Kane, the Paul Masson ads, Mike Vargas, yes, all connected, yes. black and white in motion, yes. Whether one of the critters has ever made the short passage over the Santa Lucias to munch on grapes I cannot say.

Central Coast California

Macleans Review

REVIEW: Easy to like

Canadian-born Elliot Jonson is a Hollywood screenwriter and vintner before events conspire to send him home. His penance? To become the vice-president of the CBC’s English-television programming. “It’s like PBS, but with commercials,” he explains to an American movie executive. That’s the kindest thing Elliot says about the CBC, but not the funniest, by far. The title of Riche’s hilarious new novel is a backhanded compliment to TV and wine, topics that find a surprising kinship in a story about a guy trying to simultaneously save his failing vineyard and a public broadcaster.

The book opens with Elliot schooling a couple of California trophy wives on wine appreciation. Elliot plays the straight man to their airhead banter, reassuring readers they’re in for a treat. The rest of the story races along, from FBI investigations to trouble with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We learn that Elliot was served the ultimate, ironic punishment for moving to Tinseltown after film school: his son, once a child star, is currently in prison for drug possession and robbery. But Elliot isn’t jaded about Hollywood so much as he’s tired of rejection. He calls method actors dissociative psychopaths, more like “method humans.” When Elliot lands in Toronto, his powers of observation are lethal.

The best stuff is the author’s parody of the CBC bureaucracy and its adherence to regional balance and bland programming. Elliot’s job interview is laugh-out-loud funny, as are his speeches to the staff. In the book’s acknowledgements, Riche thanks the CBC employees who “sang”—boy, did they. While “the Corpse,” as some call it, admittedly is an easy target, Riche skewers the policy wonks with glee, just as he pilloried private school administration in The Nine Planets. That book’s protagonist, Marty Devereaux, is a classic antihero, but there’s something sweeter about Elliot, who strives simply to make a great bottle of wine. Elliot’s a dreamer: “You can chase taste all you want,” he says, “you’ll never catch it.”

- Joanne Latimer  www.sinussister.com

Dis Like

These past few years I have found it ever harder to suffer heaped similes in descriptive prose, feeling the device should be used more sparingly.  I don’t think it’s a widely held view.

I’m considering writing, for a lark, something filled with failed similes, “the mountains jagged like melting butter”.

The protagonist in my new novel bemoans the lazy (and unavoidable) identification of facile taste equivalencies in wines, usually in the finding of various fruit and berries notes.  I thought it would be a little too cute to spell it out but I hope readers gather he feels it’s too easy to “like” (verb) the fermented juice of grenache grapes to cherries.

Launching in a Hurricane

Book launch is tomorrow, all are invited.  Hurricane Maria is forecast to be arriving the same day.  Perhaps we’ll be doing it in the dark.

Conversation

Interview with Weekend Arts Magazine host Mack Furlong was more a conversation than a regular Q and A.   Mack brought interesting ideas with him into the studio ( as well as a second book other than mine). It was an entirely pleasurable and stimulating experience.  Helped that Mack “got” and enjoyed the novel.

Link

Our chat was considerably longer than this so Mack did a terrific job editing it and, I believe, making me seem more lucid than was the case.

9/11 and TIFF

Here’s a re-post of the first thing I put on this site.  The “Rare Birds” film has a sort of cameo in “Easy to Like” as “Silly Goose”.  The fact that 9/11 is referenced in a line that begins on line eleven of page nine of the new book is just a coincidence, as is the fact that the official publication date is 10/9/11.

Rare Birds played the Toronto Film Festival on September 11, 2001.  The above is a ticket for a screening cancelled after that day’s news.  It was given to me by its holder, my good friend Jim Vivian. Roger Ebert saw the film the night before and was partial to it. I did not attend the festival.

wine in food

Mentioned in an interview over at my publisher’s website that my favourite wines are from Burgundy but that they have become expensive.  Most that are fit to drink are much too dear to put in the pot (when cooking small game, hare or birds, nothing else will do). When I’m preparing something au vin or bourguignon  I sometimes use a Canadian wine made from pinot noir grapes.  Canadian pinots have improved  tremendously over the past few years.  Jeremy Bonia, the wine director at Raymond’s Restaurant  http://raymondsrestaurant.com/ here in St. John’s, put me on to a particularly good value, the Pelle Island Reserve.  The wine reminds me of village wines from around Gevrey.  It’s not as fine, not as complex  as those wines (it has cherry and choke cherry but nothing like mushrooms or,  in the best examples from Gevrey, something like the meat juices of the small game), though it is a near equal in having a very silky mouth feel and it comes at a price that I can pour it in with the braise and it’s good enough to drink alongside.

grapes from Gevrey Villages courtesy Bill Nanson

If it bends …

Cartoon above is by the great Kliban and testifies once again that comedy and satire, in particular, ain’t pretty.  I once interviewed for a writing gig on a Canadian television show, a sitcom the producers imagined be an entirely good-natured affair.  They wanted the characters to be decent people, the stories redemptive.  I said such was not possible, that happy, well-adjusted people did not comedy make and didn’t get the job.  The show went on to get produced and ran for many years with fewer and fewer viewers, staying on the air for many reasons other than it being fit to watch.

No one really understands what makes something funny.  One theory I’ve heard says the laughs come from incongruities, from the calamitous collision of what’s expected and some beastly improbability. Boudu, the bum, becomes the perfect bourgeois, Kramer chips a golf ball into the sea which George recovers from the blow-hole of a beached whale, your mother farts and so on.

But the outrage must be rooted in truth.   Homer Simpson, an expert in the arena had it right.

I’ve had questions from a few early readers of Easy to Like about  the veracity of the book.  The things that people sense are real, the movie titles (“there just had to be a movie called “Total Conquest”") or the matou de gethsamane grape for instance, are  fabrications.  The things that people find absurd and improbable, the private wire taps in Hollywood, the feral zebras at San Simeon, the management non-speak, are real.   The ludicrous “360 degree management”,”branding pyramids” and “everyone, every way” are verbatim from the CBC executive suites. And, yes, a few years back, someone was, like my protagonist, invited into those same executive suites on the basis of  his dubious Tinseltown credentials.

Of course there is nothing so unfunny as explaining a joke or, as I’m doing here, theorizing how comedy works.  Woody Allen had great fun with Alan Alda’s character’s tiresome analysis in one of my favorite of Mr. Konigsberg’s films, “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, a picture that was as Old Testament serious as it was funny.

First Notice New Book

satire with taste

Published Saturday September 3rd, 2011

Edward Riche delivers a whip-smart satire on taste, TV and terroir.

F6

Mike Landry
Telegraph-Journal

Satire is not something I find particularly easy to like. It is often too cute and outrageous, two things I cannot stand outside of musicals – and I don’t particularly like those either. That’s why I must applaud Edward Riche – his new satire wasn’t just easy to like, it was finish-the-bottle-and-order-another delicious.

Enlarge Photo

What made Easy to Like work was it wasn’t just about cliché character foibles or an examination of the ludicrous bureaucracy of our society. Riche is writing about something more complicated, the fickle and subjective role of taste in society.

“If you liked something, it couldn’t be very good, could it? It would be enough, just enough to satisfy. … If one cared deeply for something, was truly devoted to its beauty, one saw only its potentiality, its possibility of perfection. Surrounded by only those examples that, at best, strove for the absolute expression, you came to wear, in joyous agony, in masochistic ecstasy, the failures as trophies.”

Riche deftly handles both sides of the argument – one: people like what they like; two: knowledge and a social agenda can change taste. He does this with the delightfully devilish screenwriter/wannabe vinter Elliot Johnson. Johnson prides himself on crafting a wine straight from his Californian plot of soil without bells, whistles or perfecting science no matter the financial loss. But he has no problem funding his noble venture by proudly penning Hollywood schlock.

Johnson’s opinion on wine is also juxtaposed with his denial of his own roots. Although he’s originally from Newfoundland, we don’t find this out until circumstances strand him in Toronto again more than 50 pages in. Elliot isn’t even his first name, he changed it for Hollywood.

Johnson’s contrarian morals come to head when, again through convenient circumstances – remember, this is a satire, so Riche is allowed a few moments of disbelief – he winds up vice-president of English programming at CBC in Toronto. Not only is he torn away from his vineyard when it needs him the most, but he finds himself successfully reshaping the CBC by giving viewers exactly what they want.

And here’s where Riche truly succeeds with his satire. Easy to Like isn’t a story about a character growing as a person, and nor is it about watching the spectacle of a man as his absurd convictions cause havoc and mayhem. This is a whip-smart, careful look at what “liking” something really means. Which, just like in grade-school crushes, complicates everything from fine wine to a prime-time Canadian comedy TV shows.

“I’m just saying … I don’t know …” Johnson fumbles to explain. “You can chase taste all you want, you’ll never catch it.”

 

Mike Landry is the Telegraph-Journal’s arts and culture editor. He can be reached at landry.michael@telegraphjournal.com.

Bayou Bayman

courtesy of Michael Winter