I have just finished Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford and it has rewired my brain. I can't remember the last time I consumed such a perfect piece of hard-boiled detective fiction that nevertheless does completely original things with the genre; it is to noir what The English (2022) is to Westerns. It's set in an alternate Jazz Age America where, due to a historical divergence in the strain of smallpox that first reached North America, Indigenous peoples continue to hold power in Cahokia in the Roaring Twenties. (There is a cameo here from the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who among many other things happens to be the father of Ursula K. Le Guin; it took me a while to figure out that Spufford dedicated Cahokia Jazz to her. This is the level of nerdery you can expect from what is otherwise a very fine piece of pulp fiction).
Anyway tl;dr I hope this gets made into a film someday so they can cast Chaske Spencer as the lead. I think what the world needs is Chaske Spencer as a hard-boiled detective, the man who must go down these mean streets but who is not himself mean, and who is also secretly a talented jazz pianist. I feel this would be such a gift.
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Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 neo-Western film directed by John Sturges with screenplay by Millard Kaufman (the creator of Mr. Magoo).
It stars Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin.
In the plot, a one-armed stranger comes to a small desert town in 1945, and uncovers a secret that has corrupted the entire community.
The film was a key reference for the design of the 2023 Wes Anderson film Asteroid City.
"Generally, we were looking at ‘Black Rock’ for overall how the town’s [located] in the landscape," confirmed designer Adam Stockhausen. "But also we’d go in and look at tiny details, too. How the tar paper was nailed to the roof of the gas station, and we ended up using it for the way we wrapped the tar paper around the motel cabins. Or the cafe when we took several little detailed pieces for the back counter of the luncheonette straight from there".
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Taby & Genie and Brook did their thing today! Laura & Portia annoy the hell outta me but i’ma praise good acting.
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Round 1
I've been locked up for 264 days.
-Shatter Me, Tahereh Mafi
Agony is socially unacceptable.
-Proof, Dick Francis
There were a few advantages to being a boy in a society dominated by women. One, Jerin Whistler thought, was that you could throttle your older sister, and everyone would say, “She was one of twenty-eight girls—a middle sister—and a troublemaker too, and he—he’s a boy,” and that would be the end of it.
-A Brother’s Price, Wen Spencer
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Ok but the tears in Genie's eyes when Laura was talking about Bobbie missing Christmas 😭
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