Steven Axelrod's Open Salon Blog

Grass Angel 4 & 5

Tue, 29 May 2012 06:05:55 -0400

Click "Back to Posts" for earlier installments

Mike noticed he was being watched two hours into first day of the exterior job. He had driven to Marine for sandpaper, sanding discs, good Swedish scrapers, a pair of Wooster brushes, some expensive Dutch oil primer and a new heat gun. He added a couple of big rubber-lined drop-cloths, a nail set, a pot hook (the good kind with the little chain so you could hang it from either side of the ladder) a bag of rags and a box of the good paper dust-masks, with the little yellow air filter nipple on the front.

Dave Congdon had always been amused by the flimsy ones with the blue elastic bands that actually informed you with a sticker on the mask that they would provide no protection of any kind, under any circumstances. “Guess they had a couple law suits happening there,” Dave had remarked.

Mike drove back out to the East end of the island under a harsh blue sky, pleased with his purchases. He felt rich and competent. It was a chill windy day but dry enough to start the prep. April 14^th – one day ahead of the IRS deadline. He hadn’t filed. He hadn’t made any money since his return and anyway, it was like Mio always said: “Fuck taxes. We got sweat equity, pandejo.”

Mike had laid the drops over the dormant hydrangeas, set up the big ladder andhad started to disk-sand the peak when he felt the eyes on him. He paused but didn’t turn around. He stared over the roof to the ocean forty feet below the grassy lip of the cliff, gnawing away at the bluff, blue to the horizon, and beyond it, all the way to Portugal. Wind ruffled the surface of the sea, but there was no swell today, just the immense vista of water and sky. Still, he knew the bluff was going, eroding relentlessly despite his spoiled neighbors’ crazy efforts to slow the process with sandbags and seawalls. He thought of King Canute, but the old man got a bad rap: he wasn’t trying to stop the tide, just proving that you couldn’t.

Mike let the icy breeze touch his face, thinking about Carol-Ann Tuttle. It had to be her, next door. He remembered the scrawny red-haired fourteen year-old, the blaze of freckles, the braying laugh, always tearing off on her bike with a day’s supply of string cheese. Her parents had moved to Vermont, a few years ago. They rented their house in the summer: Dave Congdon took care of it in the winter, checking for leaks and broken panes of glass. So many people moved from Nantucket to Vermont. Maybe they were hungry for old growth forest and vertical granite after all those years of flat ocean vistas and wind-crippled scrub pines.

Carol-Ann must have decided to hide out for the winter. He had seen the light on in her bedroom – the smallest room in the house, tucked under the eaves. No renter would stay there.Was she taking a year off between high school and college? Or just trying to decide what to do with herself? Nantucket absorbed ambition and turned it into inertia the way trees turned carbon dioxide into oxygen. Only a fool ignored that photosynthesis, that dizzy atmosphere of procrastination. You breathed it in with the pollen and the smell of the sea and decided to put things off for one more year, one more season. Especially if you were living rent-free in your parents’ house.

If Carol Ann wasn’t careful she might never leave at all.

He hoped she had something better to do than spy on him. If he ignored her, she would probably stay away. She had always been shy around him. In the last four years he had never answered one of her letters. He had treated her like an annoyance, an untrained puppy, in the old days. Why should things be any different now? But he knew the answer to that. She had always been a cute little girl. She could easily have grown into a beautiful young woman. He eased out a breath between gritted teeth. Let her be ugly, let her be fat, let her be gone.

The last thing he wanted was some teen-ager chasing him, asking to hear his stories, grasping at his arm, trying to catch his hand in hers. Carol Ann had always been overly physical, throwing herself into hugs, smothering people with kisses, stroking you while she talked.

She didn’t understand. Mike was like his Aunt Phyllis, who suffered from fibromyalgia. Phyllis wasn’t mean or cold or even rude, it just gave her unendurable pain to be touched. You could feel that way and be perfectly healthy. You could feel that way when there was no physical contact. Mike felt that way just looking another person in the eye and not averting his gaze. The intimacy of an open stare gave him migraines. Or it would if he ever tried it. That was how it felt.

That was why he had come here: to be alone, to see no one, to work.He got back to it now, letting the whine of the sander grind his thoughts into a storm of particulate dust, just like the old paint on his house.

It was important to do things right. That was what Mio and the others had never understood.

His time in country had taught him the lopsided dichotomy that seemed to rule human life. There were two kinds of people in the world, the people who tried to do as much as they could and the people who tried to do as little. Most of the people Mike had ever met fell into the latter group, including his father. His mother was different. How had they ever gotten married, two people like that, on the opposite sides of the great divide? His Dad, grudgingly doing the dishes, never getting that edge of wine off the rim of the glass, never scrubbing that hardened crumb of congealed gravy off the plate – while his Mom crouched in the garden, pulling every weed by hand.

Dave Congdon had always known the truth, and he hadn’t had to travel any farther than the distance Great Point and Smith’s Point to see it. “On Nantucket,” he liked to say, “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it twice.”

Never enough time to do it right. He remembered watching Mio cleaning his piece, scuffing the crown with the bore brush because he was in a hurry, then running one solvent patch through the barrel with his jag – instead of two, or three, or even four or however many it took, until the surface was clean. The purpose was to clean the surface, not to go through the motions, not to be able to say you did it. And of course he never oiled the barrel afterward. Mio was a genius at doing just enough not to get in trouble. But that could get you killed, and with all the things in an insane universe that could get you killed, why add one more? But of course Mio was twenty years old and assumed he was immortal. He was the exception.

Mike pulled the hammer from the loop on his pants and a nail set from his pocket. He didn’t want to think about Escomio Monterro e Yamurro Guitierrez (“Just call me Bob.”) right now. There was enough laziness right in front of him. This nail for instance. He knew it would be impossible to set, like driving it into steel, the old white pine was so hard. If it had been easy to set, the carpenters would have set it themselves. They only left the tough ones. He set the tip to the head, did the practice tap and then the hard blow -- ta – TACK; nothing. Again, harder; ta TACK. Did he sense a little progress? The next time the nail set slipped off the nail and punctured the wood. One more hole to fill. Mike took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Ta-TACK, ta TACK, TA-TACK! Finally! One more for good measure. If there were enough of these he could be up here until Labor Day.

Leave it for the next guy. Hope no one will notice. Assume no one will care. That’s how the world worked.But it didn’t have to be that way. It was a question of taking all the steps – learning the steps, first, of course, then taking them in order, that was all.

He smiled. We are fixing the world, one un-set nail at a time. It was going to be quite a project.The sash clarified everything, he thought the next day, as he began to work on them. You could leave them in place and just slap some shiny paint on the exposed surfaces and call it a day. People had been doing that at Northern Flicker for generations and the result was the old wood scabbed over and cemented into the window casings with dozens of layers of knobby cracking paint, from calcimite milk paint to the old lead based coatings, the alkyd products and the latex of the last few decades. You could giuve it a quick sanding first, if you wanted to add a step.

Or you could do it right; chip out all the old glazing, work the little metal points out of the wood, mark and set aside all the glass, then soak the frame in turpentine and linseed oil. After that, you primed it, set a bed of glazing for the glass, re-inserted it with the old sharp ended oval points (of course you had saved them: you couldn’t buy them any more, except on eBay), then puttied the glass in place, rolling the narrowing snakes of glazing compound between your palms and laying it against the glass, pushing it tight with your thumb, then flattening it with a stiff putty knife (dipped in thinner from time to time if the putty was dry) and smoothing with the flat of the blade, pulling it down to make sharp corners. After that you waited for a few days, to let the putty skim over. Then you sanded the flats again and re-primed the whole sash, making a thin sharp line with the paint to seal the glazing to the glass. Three coats of finish paint followed, sanding with finer and finer paper between them (120, 220, 300), dusting and tacking when the sanding was done.

That was how you painted a window, if you cared to do it right.Northern Flicker had sixty double-hung six-over-sixwindows, which meant a hundred and twenty sash with seven hundred and twenty individual panes of antique glass. It was Mike’s rainy-day project. He worked on them in the basement, on a house-painter’s easel, jury-rigged by drilling two screws into a sturdy wooden ladder and setting the sash on them.

It was meditation. It was therapy. The building trades had a better word for it; renovation.

He thought of Mio’s gun jamming on an icy night in the mountains, the gathering comprehension in the silence before the final thunder fell.Do things properly or not at all. If you want to speed up, slow down. Old maxims but your life could depend on them. or your pay check, or something else, just as important, maybe more important, some essence of yourself that you diluted at your peril. He didn’t have the words for it and the words didn’t matter. The glazing on the first sash needed to be chipped out.

He picked up his hammer and chisel and began.

Grass Angel 2& 3

Sun, 27 May 2012 09:05:56 -0400

Part one is here;

http://open.salon.com/blog/steven_axelrod/2012/05/25/grass_angel

Rain sheeted against the windows and dribbles of white streaked the walls as Mike sponged them down with bleach. Lightning flickered and he waited a full ten seconds for the distant rumble of thunder. He had always liked this house in the rain. It made him think of the board games they had played on the long wet August afternoons, cheap ones with missing pieces: Snakes and Ladders, Parcheesi, Risk. He had never known places like Kamchatka existed until he conquered them with a roll of the dice. War and world conquest had seemed like so much fun then, conducted over pizza and coke, with Saturday morning cartoons running in the background.

With a physical effort, like shoving a bed up against a wall, he turned his mind away from all that, broke the circuit, concentrated on nothing more than clearing swathes of clean wall through the speckled grey of the mildew, the sharp caustic smell of the fifty percent bleach solution searing his sinuses, making him dizzy. The process was simple and satisfying, wreaking order on entropy. He dipped the big sponge again.

One of the brands at the Stop&Shop had offered a lemon-scented variety. Mike shook his head. Why encourage people to smell this stuff? Did they think there were fooling anyone? Then he thought: chemical warfare, and concentrated harder on the job, to break the circuit. The bleach was eating away at the sponge. He would need a new one soon.

Bleaching and rinsing the walls and ceilings took two full days and the over-head work was exhausting. He wore goggles to keep the drips out of his eyes, and covered all the furniture and the floors with slippery plastic.He taped the cracks, skimmed them with joint compound every day for three days while he scuffed the trim with hundred grit sandpaper and ‘floated’ a coat on the woodwork. That was Dave’s term, floating – getting enough paint on the surface so it felt like you were painting the paint not the window casing, making it flow, stroking out the stop-and-start marks. Cleaning his brush at the end of the day he could begin to feel the jitter easing out of muscles and joints. He wasn’t calm and he wasn’t happy. But he wasn’t shaking any more, either.

He put his new physical stability to the test cutting in the walls against the ceiling. He had always prided himself on a sharp straight line, and he got the feel of the brush back quickly. He remembered the right amount of paint he needed, sweeping off the excess onto the wall, and letting a few bristles find the crease where the ceiling began and drawing them along in long deft movements to create the initial border. Then back with the tips of the brush, enlarging the ribbon of paint, and smoothing it out with the flat of the bristles, and on to the next section, moving the step ladder with him. The ceiling was only eight feet high but Dave had taught him always to paint eye-to-eye with the surface. He had to smile; it was like he had never left. “Once you pick up the brush,” Dave had told him, “You can never put it down again for long.”

Dave had issued that pronouncement in a gloomy drunken stupor, sitting at the bar in the Chicken Box, toasting his doomed fate with shots of Cutty Sark. He had been advising Mike to quit, to get out, to see the world and escape.

But Mike had seen enough of the world. He was glad to be back.He didn’t hit the bars at night, he had no interest in getting drunk or seeing old high school friends. He knew they were around, the ones who had taken over their fathers’ restaurants or plumbing businesses, gone into real estate or retail, or swinging a hammer while they raised families and secretly contemplating divorce.

They were all grown up and he was frozen yet he couldn’t help feeling a twist of contempt for them, for their easy island life, the peace and safety of it that they took for granted: all the things they hadn’t seen and would never know and could never understand. Maybe he just envied them. He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that he didn’t want to run into them at the Muse or the Box and ‘catch up’.

They would never catch up.

Instead he cooked simple meals, and ate them with a bottle of beer or a glass of wine, and read volumes of history from the family bookshelves until he fell asleep; Barbara Tuchman, William Shirer, Robert Caro. He wanted to understand, though he knew instinctively that understanding wouldn’t help him, wouldn’t change anything. Maybe people were just bad. Or they were weak and they lacked the courage to be good. Maybe the bad stuff was hardwired into the brain by evolution. That would be ironic. Maybe the fittest didn’t deserve to survive. He didn’t know. He kept reading.

The cable had been disconnected so there was no television at the house. Mike didn’t miss it. He hadn’t watched with any regularity for the last four years, though they had gotten to see occasional event programs – the Oscars. The Super Bowl, and you could watch the news with dinner just like at home. He had developed a peculiar fondness stitched with contempt for the suburban creatures who fixed up their own houses on the advertisements for big box stores.

Rolling his fourth ceiling of the day, as the tireless Nantucket spring rain clattered against the windows and the north-east gales roared by like phantom traffic on the empty roads, he thought of those sprightly do-it-your-selfers. Somehow, they managed to complete absurdly complex paint jobs in thirty seconds, taping every piece of trim, and peeling it away like magic to unveil their faultless redecoration, finally adjusting a single lampshade for the finishing touch. On the one hand he could use some of that effortless speed: on the other hand – taping everything? So these TV wizards couldn’t even cut in with a paint brush. Probably the big box stores just wanted to sell as much of that fancy blue painters tape as they could, at fifteen bucks a roll.

He planted his feet comfortably apart and swung his arms easily, using himself as the base of a pendulum, rocking the roller, heavy with that good dense white ceiling paint, over the patched surface above him. The big box creatures always sort of pushed the roller away from themselves, as if they were raking for scallops upside down. Mostly they didn’t use sticks at all, and just stood on ladders, clutching their rollers by the handle. Dave Congdon had always loved it when customers wanted to attempt the work themselves. When they came back, paint spattered, miserable and exhausted, they showed a healthy new appreciation for his efforts.

People always said painting was boring. But that was what he liked about it, the routine of physical effort that required no thought, only muscle memory and patience. He smiled, rolling off the excess paint against the dry section of the pan, turning the sleeve slightly to catch the drips, like a wine steward with a bottle. Muscle memory, that was the good kind.

The other kind he could do without.

Grass Angel

Fri, 25 May 2012 05:05:14 -0400

I started a new story today. It's my own version of Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, but there's no river. I know nothing about fishing, so my kid paints a house instead. Also, there are other poeople, because I write stories with other people in them and the kid falls in love. My war is Afghanistan, so no World War One; also -- no solo camping, and no shell shock. Maybe some survivor guilt. Otherwise ... just like Big Two Hearted River.

I'm not sure what I'm doing so I thought it best to do it in public. That's what Open Salon is for!

Here goes:

The abandoned house squatted on a bluff above the Atlantic Ocean, scoured by the sand and salt-laden North East winds, as it had for more than a hundred and fifty years, paint peeling, shutters askew, chimney tilting, ruined and solitary against the milling gray sky. The March air felt like December and more rain was coming.

Michael Crane stood on the over-grown lawn studying the haunted ruin of his family’s estate, the property his father and his uncles and his aunt Caroline had fought over since his childhood, the ones who wanted to sell too poor to buy out the stalwarts who loved the place. None of them spent any time here anymore, blaming the mildew and the leaky roof, all the repairs that seemed like too much trouble. It was hard enough just paying the taxes and the insurance on “Northern Flicker”. His mother had named the house after her favorite bird, and the weathered quarter board still clung to the shingles above the front door.

He smiled: home at last. The big apartment on the Upper West Side hadn’t felt like home, though they had preserved his room as if he had died or been kidnapped. Perhaps they had assumed he wouldn’t make it back, or would return so broken that a high school diary and a Shins poster over the bed would contain more of his character than his ghostly person. Residues; funny, that was the name of his high school band. His guitar still rested in the closet, permanently out of tune.

After two weeks as a guest of his angry mother and defeated father and some third entity, their prickly, bickering marriage, he had fled to the island. Now he stood among the knee-high dandelions and sedge, listening to the silence.

Nantucket had taught him to appreciate silence. It wasn’t just the absence of noise, but the collective voice of all the fragile sounds that noise concealed; the rattle of wind in the branches, the knocking of a loose shutter, a distant car engine, the barking of territorial dogs, the low rumble of the sea against the South Shore. Paying strict enough attention, he could hear something else –- a faint vibration on the air, a vast whisper beneath the surface of things. Not God, he wasn’t religious, not any more – how could you be? Any deity who could create or even permit the things Mike had seen was not a creature he wanted anything to do with.

He preferred a random universe. He was tired of blame.

Mike leaned into the strengthening wind, watching the house, and without making any conscious decision, he knew what he was going to do. The house needed work, it needed attention, it needed love. He would fix it up, make it beautiful again. Not like the other houses on the bluff, gutted and refurbished and robbed of their history and character; just groomed, scraped and sanded and painted, windows re-glazed, shutters repaired and re-hung, rotten boards replaced, gutters cleaned and soaked in linseed oil.

He would have to start with the inside, bleaching the mildew off the walls, rinsing them, patching the cracks and rolling on a few coats of fresh latex, scratch-sanding and urethaning the old pine floors. That would take him into the warm part of the spring, in time to start work on the outside. When his parents arrived on Memorial Day the place would be waiting for them, reborn in the mild summer air.

The job would keep him busy, keep him away from other people, give him something useful to do with his hands. He had his family’s charge account at Marine Home Center, and Dave Congdon’s ladders piled up in the back yard, chained but not locked, to discourage only the laziest thieves.

The plan had its own force; it was waiting for him, solid and attentive, just like the house itself.He slipped the key out from under its shingle, the traditional Nantucket hiding place, as much a formality as Dave Congdon’s chains. It was at least ten degrees colder inside. He paused for a moment, sniffed the resinous perfume of old wood, dusty carpets, the sharp tang of mold. Then he grabbed the flashlight off the hall table, climbed down the steep stairs to the basement, avoiding the two broken treads, pulled the main switch on the fuse box, started the furnace and turned on the water. He could feel the house rumbling to life around him. When the hot water heater filled, he would turn that on also. Dave had taught him to wait, to not burn out the filament.

The old red Jeep Cherokee rested on the crushed shell driveway, out of sight between the house and the sagging one-car garage, sleeping standing up like an old horse. It started on the first turn of the key. Dave Congdon supposedly drove it every few weeks to keep the batteries charged. In fact, he used it as his primary vehicle in the winter: Mike’s father ritually checked the odometer when they arrived for the summer, always with the same resigned shrug that seemed to say, this was Nantucket, what else could you expect?

Dave’s family had lived on the island for a hundred and fifty years. Five generations of Congdons had been taking care of the same houses all that time, as various owners came and went, through all the sales and foreclosures and renovations. No wonder Dave felt proprietary about the place. He or his son Larry would be shutting off the water and replacing the storm doors and keeping some car’s battery going long after Mike and his family had moved away.

Still, it was Mike’s house for now. And it needed more help than Dave Congdon was willing to give it. He climbed into the jeep and pulled out onto Baxter Road, deciding on the straight shot into town on Milestone Road over the winding route along Polpis Harbor.

He didn’t notice the face at the second floor window of the Tuttle house next door. If he had glanced up he would have seen the quick flash of a young woman’s smile, before the blinds fell.

American Idol: Real Wins the Night

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:05:28 -0400

American Idol had its finale last night and Steven Tyler won. The actual winner, Phil Phillips, came in a close second, dragging a tentative John Fogerty (Annie laughed and called him "John Fogey") with him.

Tyler's brief set with an ecstatically reunited Aerosmith blew all the other big name guest stars away, including Jennifer Lopez, whose two underwhelming auto-tuned performance pieces seemed to epitomize everything fake and awful in today's pop music. Aerosmith took the stage and it didn't matter. Their songs seemed sloppy and un-rehearsed, but the music was all the more vibrant for that. I thought of Mick Jagger bounding across the stage during his Super Bowl half-time show. But there's a studied quality to the Rolling Stones, the sense they put out just enough energy to get the job done. Mick Jagger has a personal trainer.

Steven Tyler has a sloth.

Which seems more Rock and Roll to you?

You can tell that Fogerty dyes his hair, while Aerosmith goes defiantly grey and still seems decades younger the the CCR frontman. Listening to this classic, road-tested, battered, battling bad-ass band, I thought -- "Oh, this is what REAL rock and roll sounds like! I had almost forgotten." But in those few high octane, prancing and prowling moments, the numbing mediocrity of so much of American Idol (both its characterless song-bot contestants and its flavor of the split-second guest stars) fell away, the Hummel figurines Steven Tyler brushed off a table with his arm so he could jump up on it and dance.

I'm so glad American Idol chose Tyler to be a judge. I was never a fan of Aerosmith and I had only the vaguest idea of who he was before he started this new gig. Now I know. He's the real deal, a wild man with a big heart and every bad habit you can pick up in forty years on the road. Sometimes I don't agree with him, sometimes I have no idea what he's even talking about ("You're picking cherries with your back to the tree!"), but his erratic, spontaneous gentle spirit has kept the show alive for the last two years. The other judges sat by the fancy reflecting pool and gave their verdict to the contestants -- Tyler jumped in and took a swim. I love him for that. He's alive on the planet, kissing the pretty girls, singling along with the talented kids, while his colleagues just seem to be going through the motions.

But Tyler wasn't the only real, live human being on the show last night, and he wasn't the only original talent, either. In Phil Phillips, Idol's 132,000,000 voters finally picked a deserving standard-bearer. He never seemed fiully engaged with the process, despite his easy charm and Steve McQueen good looks. He refused to dress up and play the pop-star part, even after being chided for his casual attire by Jimmy Iovine. He wore his t-shirts and played his guitar and you could tell that the crack studio musicians on the show had found a kindred spirit and a fellow musician. He was always the most interesting performer on the program, with his rough voice and odd intonations refreshing old songs and making new ones urgent.

His first single as an Idol tells you so much about him. It's nothing like the usual machine made pablum about reaching your dreams and not giving up. It's a love song called "Home", that sounds like it was co-0written by Woody Guthrie and Paul Simon. I wonder if Phil had a hand in it -- it's impossible to find a song-writing credit on-line. It's a beautiful song, disarmingly simple and authentic, a perfect opal in a drawer full of costume jewelery and cubic zirconium. It's interesting to me that Phil couldn't finish singing it last night, as the applause washed over him and the confetti stuck to his lips. He let the band finish up as he embraced his family. It wasn't the full throated victorious performance Idol expected and I got they feeling the show was going off the rails a little in those final moments. But Phil never really played by the rules.

He was always a reluctant contestant and now he's become a reluctant winner. You can almost imagine him chucking it all and going back to work in his family's pawn shop, but I hope he doesn't. Stick it out, Phil! Go on the road with Aerosmith, pick jup some bad habits and learn to have fun.

I want to see you still rocking the house at sixty.

What's Really Wrong with "John Carter"

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:03:34 -0400

Walt Disney announced a $200,000,000 write down on their calamitous flop John Carter today, and all over Hollywood pundits and producers are scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened. The consensus seems to be that Andrew Stanton (Pixar golden boy director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E) was too faithful to the corny and cliché source material. His love of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels blinded him to their confusing narratives, over-the-top characters and penny-dreadful melodrama. As a result he made a movie that would have wowed the rubes in 1912; a hundred years later it all feels as dull and creaky as a rusty horse drawn carriage. It’s not even steam punk, though modern weaponry seems to co-exist with broadswords on the Mars of this movie. Steam requires heat and the punks are all watching Chronicle and downloading the new Shins album.

Allow me to disagree.

Unlike most of these reviewers, I’ve actually read the books. Anticipating the film, I downloaded the whole series of five novels (more than 2000 pages) onto my Nook for a couple of dollars, which has to be one of the best bargains ever. I read them the way a kids eats Halloween candy, chugged them like a marathon runner chugs Gatorade. And here’s my report from the front lines of actual reading and the prime source of the books themselves.

The books are good. They’re huge enthralling silly fun and yes they’re corny by that gee-whiz turn-of the last-century American go-getter optimism creates a consistent and charming tone. Many of the tropes Burroughs invented have been ripped off, or ‘anthologized’ by generations of filmmakers, most notably in recent years, Lucas, Spielberg and Cameron. The auteur of Avatar even admitted he was making ‘an Edgar Rice Burroughs movie’. What none of these directors have managed to duplicate or purloin is the tone of Burrough’s breathless prose. And no one has fallen so far short as Andrew Stanton. Apparently his love for the material is sincere; all the more baffling that he would betray it so artlessly. The list of blunders is endless, but you can start withg that “jumbled, confusing narrative” that all the critics complained about. No one ever complained about the jumbled narrative in a Burroughs novel. And one ever called Tchaikovsky “tuneless”.

The Barsoom novels plots move straight ahead at rocket speed. John Carter finds himself on a strange world and wins it over utterly. That would be a quick blurb. He is captured by the giant green skinned Tharks and becomes close friends with their leader; he is assigned a vicious guard dog who he befriends with a few strokes and kind words. Soon the ferocious Woola is nuzzling him and defending him with the whole of its crazy, ten-legged armor-plated pug’s body and soul. Carter treats the Thoats the same way. The Thark beasts of burden are just big horses to him, and he loves horses -- he's a cavalryman back on Earth. He’s also the first creature who has ever treated one of them with kindness. Tharks just beat their mounts into submission – and as a result, the beasts are almost as dangerous as the enemy, apt to turn on their riders at any time. The loyalty these animals feel for Carter is another part of his legend among the peoples of Barsoom. Of course, none of this lovely material makes into the movie. There’s a CGI Woola, but no explanation for his bond with Carter. The whole loveless collective world of the Tharks – kids are hatched from eggs and never even know their parents – is side-lined .. which makes the one enduring child-parent bond, between leader Tars Tarkas and his daughter Sola, almost completely meaningless in the dusty swirl of computer generated swordplay and bloodshed.

Many of the big changes from novel to film struck me as cowardly. The idea of Dejah Thoris (the Princess of Mars herself) being an old fashioned 'damsel in distress' must have seemed too hokey and politically incorrect. So the film makes her into some kind of science geek who hides her true identity. Dejah Thoris is no science geek, fellas. And she would never, not for one second, have hidden her true identity.

But that's not all. You can almost see the executives sitting around saying, “All the air is on the planet is supplied by some big factory? And -- let me get this straight … the only way in or out of the place is some bizzaro nine-part mental mantra that opens the doors … right, because everyone’s psychic on goofy world. And Carter just happens to figure out this brain wave deal and manages to save the whole planet in the nick of time by getting into the factory –or something? Come on. And I thought the sparkly vampires were weird.”

Well, sorry, studio guy. The sparkly vampires did okay, and the air factory was a lot cooler than the shape shifting whatevers that the film-makers jammed in there to explain everything that made no sense. These bald deus-ex-machina dudes are called Therns and they don’t appear in A Princess of Mars (kind of better title than the generic John Carter, but sales gurus had figured out that Mars as a setting was the kiss of death. Remember Mars Attacks! And Mars wants Moms? Well, science fiction itself was DOA until Star Wars came out, with all its tributes and homages to Burroughs. Ordinary people might say … if you think Mars is the kiss of death, don’t spend 250 million dollars setting a movie there.)

Anyway, the Therns are crucial to understanding just how cataclysmically these Burroughs fan-boys fouled things up. The movie would have you believe that the Therns are the ruthless omniscient Gods of the red planet, manipulating reality and men’s fate at their whim. Ironically, this is exactly what the Therns of the books want the denizens of Mars to believe. But they aren’t gods; they’re sadistic charlatans who use the gullible hapless Martians as their sacrifices and slaves. To go to the land of the Therns is essentially to cruise down the river Styxx: it means death and no one has ever come back from the Valley of the Dor. Well, no, because they’re captured, enslaved and frequently eaten by a barbaric cult of arrogant cannibals. If anyone ever does return from the Valley of the Dor they are killed as heretics. Martians would rather slaughter their own friends than take a moment to realize that the sin they want to kill them for completely refutes the whole crazy religion. All of this seems spectacularly apposite in the age of Santorum and the Evangelical Right. But there’s no sign of it in the Stanton’s pedestrian film.

There are many more examples, but I’ve made my point.

So what’s the moral of the story? It should be a sobering one to studio heads and film financiers, but a curiously heartening one for the average writer, peckng away at his computer in the small hours, after work. Because the simple astonishing fact is that one failed pencil sharpener salesman with a rickety manual typewriter and a ream of onion skin paper made a product infinitely more entertaining and satisfying, relevant and riveting than an army of journeymen with hundreds of million dollars to spend managed to do.

The result: in my mind the hurtling moons of Barsoom will always mean escape and freedom and adventure.

In the movie, the moons don’t even move.

I think that says it all.