Pianist,composer and bandleader Chick Corea is one of the jazz genre’s most unique and diversified voices. One of his earliest recordings, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, is a landmark piano trio recording and was followed by a stint with Miles Davis who encouraged him to explore the electric piano and his own groundbreaking experiments with Return To Forever, first in a mixed electric-acoustic Latin-Brazilian format and then in pure electric jazz rock. He challenged the avant garde with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul in Circle and performed duets with Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck and Hiromi. At one time, he worked with both Acoustic and Elektric bands. In recent years, he toured with his bandmate from the Miles Bitches Brew period, guitarist John McLaughlin. In short, there’s no direction or combination of musicians that Corea hasn’t explored.

For his feature article in the 2010 Playboy Jazz Festival program, “Pop and Sizzle: Plugging Into Jazz Fusion,” the Rabbit had an email exchange with the always busy Corea about his early Miles experiences, his interest in all kinds of music and how his diverse past affects his equally diverse present. Here’s the complete exchange.

–As Stanley Clarke says in the “Chick Corea” documentary, “Chick has no problems with changing.” You’ve explored and developed so many styles of music—no need for me to list them—what has driven you? Why have you been (and continue to be) open to so many styles and genres? Is your father’s influence a key? And how does it relate to your own composing?

I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, but most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and the artists that create within them. Often, rather than seeing another way of music as only a “curiosity”, I want to understand it more intimately – and that leads me to studying the music of and participating with the musicians of that culture.
–When you look back on the period in 1969 when In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew were recorded, how do you view what was going on then? How would you characterize the musical times? Were you aware that what you were doing with Miles would be thought to be so innovative and different? That it reflected the shifting cultural and social  times?

From present time looking back on the 60’s, it seems that there was more agreement and acceptance in society of experiment and change. There certainly was in the arts. If I compare it to what’s happening now, it seems “The Media” and “big business” has the flow of art locked up and tightened down. The public has gotten used to it. The result is, less individuality and thus everything else that goes along with that negative direction.

Of course at the time we were recording In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, none of us were talking about what “impact” it might have on the future. Miles was in a constant mode of search and change; it all seemed perfectly natural. And, for me, still does.

–It would be great to have an anecdote from those days, some unique memory that reflects the spirit of those times. In his biography, Jack Chambers quotes Miles saying that after you first joined the group, you and he would “talk about music until late every night.” Is there anything that stands out from those discussions that you recall? What was the setting?

The first gig the Miles Davis Quintet played after Tony Williams left the band was a week’s engagement at a club in Rochester (Duffy’s Tavern?). Jack DeJohnette joined the band and we just finished the first set. As we were walking off stage, I was following Miles off to the left, he muttered to me: “Change again.” in his familiar cryptic way. I took it to mean that he had scanned his whole musical life in an instant and seen the constant change. Maybe he was resisting it at that moment – - I’ll never know.

–When you did the Five Peace Band Project, did you feel it to be part of a fusion legacy? Or was it something that stood apart, reflecting the current times? Both? How does the spirit of what you did then affect what you do now (ie, The Freedom Band)?

Working with John and the gang in the Five Peace Band felt fresh as a daisy to me. Not much talk about the past during the tours. But there was an unspoken (sometimes spoken) reverence expressed for Miles and “the day” – delivered in a manner not wanting to dwell on the past but with real feeling.
–Fusion can also suggest a combining of personalities, something you’re very familiar with especially considering the wide array of duo performances –Hiromi, Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck, Bobby McFerrin, et al—you’ve done over the years. Can you address the dynamic of fusing musical personalities in performance, how it affects those involved and what they create?

Making music with other musicians is an ultimate joy. To be a part of a group creation when there is complete giving amongst the group is my pay for being a musician. And each musician is a unique world unto himself. This is the subtle and high level challenge of communication between free spirits. Unencumbered by any particular protocol, and with a desire to make the other sound the best he can sound, soulful and satisfying music can be made. I’m fortunate to have these kind of associations with my musician friends.

I remember a wonderful incident when Herbie Hancock and I were first beginning to play 2 pianos together. At first we were careful about “not getting in each other’s way”. The playing moved cautiously and slowly. Then we both discovered that we could play whatever we wanted and never get in the other’s way because there was no offering from the other that wasn’t fully accepted and enjoyed. We were both trying to make the other sound good. We had a good laugh over that.

During times of conformity, it’s the non-conformist who draw all the attention. The Beats of America’s 1950s stood so far apart from the duty-bound, God-and-country, organizational-man times that they soon became the freak-show focus of films, big-circulation magazines and television shows. It didn’t take long for the commercial culture to assimilate them in a wave of berets and bongos. Like the hippies that followed, they were stereotyped and scorned for a supposed anti-work ethic. Never mind that they created some of the greatest literary works of their generation.

That’s why we’ve always thought that “Beat” and “Beatnik” were two different schools. Beatniks were the posers, the wannabes that modeled their cool afterwhat they saw in Look magazine and on The Steve Allen Show. Beatniks spewed “daddy-o” while living off their daddies. Those that represented a true counter culture were Beat. Their resistance to the status quo and the pursuit of their own lives outside accepted social definitions made them truly radical and innovative. The Beats were largely a literary movement. Beatniks were a cultural and commercial fad.

This hair-splitting is important to understanding writer Harvey Pekar, illustrator Ed Piskor and others’ collection The Beats: A Graphic History. Many of their subjects don’t seem to be beatniks, but something else entirely. The comics celebrate the individuals that made up the anti-establishment of the times and whose art and social action outlives them. The stories are drawn by an eclectic mix of cartoonists and told by characters—including Pekar–every bit as individualistic as their subjects.

The book’s first hundred pages focuses on the generation’s three central players: Jack Kerouac (who gets the largest section), Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs. Pekar gives us just the bare bones of their stories, emphasizing the formative moments and underscoring how they influenced each others’ work. It’s this no-man-is-an-island connection between them that made Beat literature a true movement. In different panels we see the often drunk and shiftless Kerouac urge Burroughs to write a novel, and Ginsberg, finding Burrough’s pages strewn around his Mexico City apartment, assembling and editing what was to become Naked Lunch.

It’s Ginsberg who emerges as the movement’s saint aiding his fellow writers, challenging the system and remaining true to his principles. All three men are shown to be flawed, addictive and with, the possible exception of Ginsberg who seems something of a pure sexual being, abusive to women and sexually confused.

Beat lovers will be disappointed the simplistic, boilerplate hash of these lives, especially readers who’ve delved into the excellent (and not so) biographies of these three central figures. Paul Buhle, the book’s editor, and Pekar acknowledge as much in the book’s intro:

“The book before you is a comic art production with no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages, a literature also constantly growing. It has a different virtue, curiously in line, somehow, with the original vernacular popularization of the Beats.”

That virtue, they neatly explain, is its fresh, visual approach and appeal to narrative rhythm. And it’s true for much of the book. Some eleven illustrators contribute and their panels, ranging from symbolic realism to the surreal bring the movement to life. We’re shown the crash-pad hovels, the anger, frustration and depravity, the exotic locations and the confusion of the squares in comic detail. Pekar and five other writers supply the words, often restating the obvious when a quote or illustration would do.

This isn’t the first time comics have been used to convey Beat life. Rick Bleier’s heavily cross-hatched “Visions of Paradise: Kerouac in N.Y.C.” which appears in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats is a visually fascinating if glamorized, short account of the movement’s beginnings that surpasses in language and visual appeal most of what’s in Pekar’s book. Where Pekar et al succeed is in their addressing the lesser but still important figures of the Beat movement.

The Beats’ second hundred pages– “The Beats: Perspectives”– is its best. It emphasizes the era’s poets and the important role of women to both its creative achievement and social consciousness. Poets Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson and others, not all of them necessarily pegged as Beats, are given brief, respectful treatment. Joyce Brabner’s “Beatnik Chicks” is an eyes-open view to the contributions and hardships, not to mention stereotyping, faced by women of the movement. Brabner defines the “Beat-chick” model as well as the their lack of acceptance by many males in the movement. She gives a shout-out to Carolyn, Cassady, Hettie Jones, Joynce Johnson and others, but no more than a shout out. (readers should dig up Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution for considerations and examples of these women’s work). Pekar and Mary Fleener’s chapter on poet Diane di Prima, first seen in Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieri’s spring 2008 edition of Mineshaft (a great publication true to the underground comics and literary spirit…find it here) is a mix of cold reality and spiritualistic surrealism that symbolizes the entire movement.

It’s good to see Pekar involving himself in this kind of counter-culture history. The last run, back in 2008, of Pekar’s American Splendor, the comics that with help from Robert Crumb established him as a storyteller and inspired the 2003 movie starring Paul Giamatti, was something of a disappointment. It was as if Pekar had exhausted ways to make his everyman stories relevant. The Beats gives him worthy material. While not as engaging as his graphic history Students For a Democratic Society (also edited by Buhle), The Beats serves to introduce an American cultural phenomenon to a new audience while giving some of its less well-known players fresh exposure.–Cabbage Rabbit

You’ve heard it said, even sung: Every picture tells a story. No where is that statement more true than in comics. And no comic illustrator tells deeper, more meaningful, more entertaining, more eye-pleasing stories than Chris Ware. Ware’s comics are so innovative, so artistic, clever and literate that they bridge the gap between pop and fine culture, even as they never pretend to be anything other than cartoons.

Memory serves Ware, coloring his panels with a sort of cartoon nostalgia. His work is out of the great comics tradition: Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, Little Nemo, a host of troubled superheroes, the 1960s and ‘70s underground comics of R. Crumb, Kim Deitch and others, even Mad magazine parodies and Japanese comic knock-offs. Editions of his long-running Acme Novelty Library are introduced with arcane and satiric advertisements straight out of marketing’s quaint past. It’s easy to picture Ware at his drawing desk behind a swirling pair of X-Ray Specs, those that offered suckers the chance to see through the clothing and the world at large. But there’s one big difference: Ware’s actually work. How else to explain his insight?

Since the success of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, Ware has been everywhere; in art galleries on the cover of The New Yorker and the pages of The New York Times, as editor in 2004 of the landmark, all-comics edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Number 13 and, more recently, The Best American Comics 2007.

Even as he connects with the comics of our youth, Ware always brings something new to his panels: new illustration styles, new ways of arranging panels, new depth of thought, experience and emotion. His amazing Jimmy Corrigan transcends time and space in a depressingly lonely epic of fathers and sons. His series Rusty Brown is a delayed coming-of-age saga of a man-child in love with collectibles. Quimby the Mouse—he’s no Mickey– avoids a real life as he indulges in the worst pop culture has to offer.

The latest edition of his The Acme Novelty Library, Number 18, pulled from Ware’s Building Stories series, is an Eleanor Rigby tale of a young lady with only a leg-and-a-half, a girl “too eager to be loved” who suffers insomnia, the ignorance of an indifferent society and nagging self-doubt of the sort that seems to surface often in Ware’s writing and sketch books. The story’s emotional depth and subject matter, ranging from abortion to xenophobia, make it Ware’s most literate work to date. That release, and the publication of a second volume of his sketchbooks, The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Two, made good reason for a talk with the artist himself.

Ware doesn’t do many interviews. Notable exceptions include his participation in Todd Hignite’s 2006 study In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists from Yale University Press and a 2001 interview with The New York Times in which he asked its author, “This interview isn’t going to be printed in “question  & answer” format, is it? … Because a lot of my thoughts tend to come out muddled and ungrammatical and, if nothing else, inarticulate.” One of the publicists told us Ware doesn’t like interviews and we guessed it’s because of his work ethic. “Cartooning takes a really, really long time and is hard, lonely work,” he writes in the introduction to The Best American Comics 2007. ”Pages upon hundreds of pages are drawn and thrown away before any writer or artist eventually finds him or her-self. The reader may even reliably calculate that the time it takes to read a comic strip story to the time it took to draw it is roughly 1: 1,000.” Or, as he states in one of the ads from Acme Novelty Library Number 16: “Ruin Your life: Draw Cartoons! And Doom Yourself to Decades of Grinding Isolation Solipsism and Utter Social Disregard.”

So, after frequent and pitiful pleading to Ware’s publishers and publicists, a reply came back saying Ware would agree to an interview–not by phone but by e-mail–limited to five questions. When the answers didn’t come back in the allotted two weeks we became dismal. But, like Rusty Brown in pursuit of a 1970s-era Pillsbury Funny Face Drink Mix figurine of Looney Lemon, we persisted. Unlike Rusty Brown, our patience was rewarded. “Here are my constipated and over-thought answers,“ he wrote. “My apologies for the delay in getting these back to you, but our household was struck by a rather unforgiving bout of bronchitis (due, I think, my daughter’s just starting to attend preschool) so I was “held back” a bit.”

We found the answers to our questions considered and anything but constipated. Self-doubt is an artistic affliction and a number of the entries in the new Datebook are self-critical. How difficult is it for him to maintain confidence in what he’s creating?

Well, all I’ve ever wanted to do with my “art” (whatever that is) is to see as clearly and truthfully as I possibly can — which is, of course an impossibility, — but at least it’s something of a modest goal. I know there are certain artists or writers who try to trick, fool or make fun of their readers or viewers, but that attitude, to me, is almost a sort of intellectual homicide. I also think it’s entirely up to the artist to be his or her own harshest critic; one shouldn’t expect the benefit of the doubt from generations of readers who haven’t been born yet (which I’ve also always thought should be an artist’s “target audience,” if I can employ a ridiculous contemporary cliché.) None of this changes the fact that I’m always dissatisfied with what I do; maybe it’s just a personality quirk, or something.

There’s a line in Ware’s latest Datebook that says, “I couldn’t shake the sensation that I am still a teenager watching it all happen before me—probably due to America’s perpetration of adolescence as ‘culture’…” Rusty Brown and Jimmy Corrigan seem to travel easily between their youth and adult years. We asked Ware to discuss this notion of the child/adult existing simultaneously and where it might have come from.

I guess some of this originates with listening to my grandmother tell me stories about her own childhood and early life; she was such a wonderfully gifted storyteller that the real world would seem to disappear when she was talking and the images she’d create would take over, so vividly in some cases that I remember them now almost as if they happened to me. She inspired me to try and get this same evocative sense into my own stuff, and in doing so I realized that everyone stores away and keeps similar memories and details alive within them, whether they’re readily accessible or not. Our consciousnesses are as fluid as water in a bathtub; we can go anywhere, anytime we want in our minds, and do, all the time.

Also, I guess I’ve realized as I’ve become older that our perceptions aren’t always the most reliable reporters of reality. This fact was really highlighted for me at the last high school reunion I attended: my forty-year old friends and I were sitting looking at an old yearbook from our fifth grade year and we all agreed that not only did the pictures of the eighth graders still look imposing and frightening to us, but that when we looked at each other, we couldn’t even see our forty year old faces, only those of the children we once were. I realized that something very strange was happening there — as adults, I’m convinced that not only our memories but also our mental generalizations of experience (i.e. words and concepts) affect and even distort our perceptions. Comics are a sort of in-between tightrope walk of all of these things.

Architecture, often of the unique or classic sort, serves an important role in Ware’s work. The narrative from the new book opens “Once upon a time, there was a building…” and closes with the same building. Why has Ware made architecture such an integral part of his work?

Again, it probably comes back to memories of the house I grew up in and memories of my grandmother’s house; I navigate those places almost daily in my mind, and the three-dimensional “maps” I’ve internalized are all also filled with stories, so for better or for worse I frequently try to work that way when I’m writing and drawing fiction. In the case of the New York Times strip, it was very specifically designed to be about one day in the life of a building itself, and so began and ended with images of it (as well as changed orientation in relation to the sun as it passed overheard, as pretentious as that is to admit.)

One of Ware’s most attractive features is the design of his pages: various sized panels, small panels clustered in larger panels as if to point out detail, full pages with arrows leading from scene/text to the next scene. Where did these design elements come from?

Well, again, not to flog this notion to death, but it really all comes from trying to work in a way that most closely resembles the way I seem to remember things and relate them to each other, as well as to reflect the texture of the world as I’ve come to know it; I want there to be a certain sense of detail and intricate level of resolution of information that’s analogous to my experience of the natural world. I think this idea of “the natural world influencing art” esthetic was sort of wiped out in the 20th century by modernism (or “art influencing the natural world”) and I guess I just feel more of a sympathy with the former, that’s all. I am not, however, trying to confuse anyone, but simply to recreate the same sense of contradictory certainty and uncertainty I have in my own experiences. Since I’m working visually, sometimes that looks unnecessarily complicated, though I’d hope by the content and presentation that it’s at least somewhat obvious that I’m not making fun of the reader. I work entirely by feeling, however, and so I trust what feels right as I’m working.

Ware says he’s looking ahead to Acme Novelty Library Number 19 and will continue work on both the Building Stories and Rusty Brown series. His response to a question on his editing comics anthologies reflects his view on the current state of the art.

I don’t think I’ll be editing any more anthologies again very soon after the last Best American Comics; I was afraid after the McSweeney’s issue I’d edited that my foisting my taste and love of all of those artists’ recent work twice in such a relatively short time would be something of an overload. It seems that my interest in experimental cartoonists who write about more or less real-life experiences isn’t necessarily reflective of the general comics readership, which is of course fine; I just genuinely believe I presented some of the best work published in 2006, and I was actually surprised by the varied quality of most of it once it was all gathered together. John Updike very eloquently articulated the difference between genre writing versus non-genre writing in a recent New Yorker book review, which bears repeating: “Thrillers, as we shall call them, offer the reader a firm contract: there will be violent events, we will go places our parents didn’t take us, the protagonist will conquer and survive, and social order will, however temporarily, be restored. The reader’s essential safety … will not be breached. The world around him and the world he reads about remain distinct; the partition between them is not undermined by any connection to depths within himself.” It’s curious to me that the traditional genre content of the comic books which I grew up loving has now become an established part of mainstream culture, though I don’t think cartoonists trying to write human-scale stories in any way threatens that extremely widely-read establishment. I’m simply pleased that comics have started to show that they can plumb those sorts of depths, too.

]]> http://cabbagerabbit.com/2008/05/26/comic-genius/feed/ 0 http://cabbagerabbit.com/2008/05/08/judge-of-character/ http://cabbagerabbit.com/2008/05/08/judge-of-character/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 21:07:50 +0000 broadway http://www.wesbroadway.com/cr/?p=41

It’s the commonly used coffee house criteria to define enjoyable fiction: “I identified with the characters.” If we recognize ourselves or others we know in a story, we’re more susceptible to being drawn in. But the characters in The Book Of Other People, an anthology of character sketches/short stories, aren’t…

It’s the commonly used coffee house criteria to define enjoyable fiction: “I identified with the characters.” If we recognize ourselves or others we know in a story, we’re more susceptible to being drawn in. But the characters in The Book Of Other People, an anthology of character sketches/short stories, aren’t exactly people you would want to identify with. There’s one person in the story “The Liar” you might want to be; that is if you have a Messiah complex. Even then, you might not want to identify with this Jesus, seeing that he has doubts about who he really is. Another character you might identify with is a monster. Really.

This gaggle of character sketches, most of them about less than admirable characters, is edited by Zadie Smith, author of Beauty and a couple other novels. Smith brought together 23 (mostly) fellow celebrity writers and instructed them to “make someone up” (the book’s proceeds benefit a children’s writing program in New York). We suspect that some of these characters aren’t made up as much as they are actual sketches of people the writers know. Take Jonatahn Safran Foer’s “Rhoda” who’s the type of smothering, busy-body mother (“Have a cookie,” is the story’s first sentence) of the type we all know.

In style, these sketches are out of The New Yorker school of short stories. Indeed, half a dozen of the stories here, including Smith’s own, were first published in the magazine and many of the book’s contributors are familiar to New Yorker readers. As such, the collection is diverse in class, race and setting. We’re not told so much what the characters look like as we are told what they’re thinking. Sometimes what they’re wearing is important as in Vendela Vida’s “Soliel” in which the lingerie-as-evening-wear look suggests feminine motives. In a sense, the collection defines the current state of the short story. Apparently, one of the characteristics that define today’s short stories is the unlikable personalities of its protagonists.

So we have Heidi Julavits’ “Judge Gladys Parks-Schutlz”, an “insincerely cheery” woman, a judge known “for her imperviousness to human context,” a person who is interested only in outcomes. Then there is A.L. Kennedy’s “Frank,” a man whose obsessive desire for repetition and familiarity is so important it drives his wife away. ZZ Packer’s “Gideon” is a gutless guy who collects crickets and doesn’t have the conviction to out his inter-racial relationship. In George Saunders’ “Puppy,” you won’t like the suburban mom with a van full of kids out to buy the puppy, or the white trash family who has the puppy available. You certainly wouldn’t identify with David Mitchell’s “Judith Castle.” You‘d never throw yourself at anyone like that. You may not end up liking any of these characters. But you’ll certainly enjoy the stories they inhabit.

The likable, innocent characters here are either children or child-like. No, not the selfish children packed into the suburban mom’s van on their way to buy a puppy. The 11-year-old who accompanies Soliel to Lake Tahoe in pursuit of a good time is extremely sympathetic, which makes the model set for her even worse. Chris Ware’s graphic childhood of “Jordan Wellington Lint” (the book has two stories in comic form) follows little Lint from his earliest perceptions on to more impressionable experiences. You won’t like what these experiences make of him. Probably the most loveable character is, well, the most loved, a crazed sex addict named “Magda Mandela” who announces to a group of construction workers, “I have a condom. Line up. I am ready.” But you wouldn’t identify with her (would you?).

The more exotic locations are populated with the best-drawn characters. Edwidge Danticat’s “Lele” is inhabited with seemingly respectable Haitians existing in a world of extreme heat, exploding frogs and a crooked judiciary. Adam Thirwell’s “Nigora”—she’s described as “a minor character”– is sympathetic until you start to question who fathered her unborn child and why she’s decides to carry it to an untimely birth.

The parodies—people you can laugh at—might be the most enjoyable. Cartoonist Daniel Clowes’ comic character “Justin M. Damiano,” chief film critic for justindamiano.com, faces an ethical decision after learning not to like anything. The author blurbs collected in Nick Hornby’s “J. Johnson,” with illustrations by Posy Simmonds, read a lot like the contributors’ bios at the end of this book, complete with those who were “short-listed” for various literary prizes.

Then there’s that monster in Toby’s Litt’s story. He has little sense of himself, no idea of what he looks like, little memory and no clue as to his sexual drive. I don’t know about you, but there’s someone that I can identify with.—Cabbage Rabbit

The Book Of Other People edited by Zadie Smith; Penguin Books, paperback 287 pages, $15

A version of this review was published in The Inland Empire Weekly

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The answer to why a decade separates Thomas McGuane’s last two novels is as complicated as one of the charming scoundrels who populate his eight previous works. Rumor had it that the writer, rancher and former movie director had grown tired of the publishing business.

“That was part of it,” McGuane says from his ranch in Sweet Water County, Montana. “We have to drive everything we do through this aperture of New York City and I get tired of dealing with all that it requires. And we have such a busy life. I’ve got four children in the area, three grandchildren, a falling down ranch to prop up. It’s not that I’ve been sucking my thumb waiting for a better day. But writing another novel just got de-emphasized. My first book came in the ‘60s and it seemed appropriate to take a break at the quarter-century mark. And it gave me time to write about some things that I love. I didn’t care if they were important to the publishing business or not.”

There is another reason for the gap of ten years between McGuane’s last novels, a reason that reflects the struggle between the old and new West, a re-occurring theme in his own life. Tired of being tied to a desktop computer, he wrote his latest novel The Cadence of Grass (Knopf) out in long hand. “I felt like I couldn’t write unless I was at the computer terminal and I didn’t like that feeling. So I wrote this last one out by hand. But I can’t live with my writing. I just got a thin laptop. I’m hoping it will supplant my bad handwriting.”

Images of old and new Montana sit side-by-side in The Cadence of Grass. An ornate, mechanical cash register stands next to an electronic box used to process credit cards. A woman tries on a sexy black evening dress while wearing manure-stained boots. There’s a dried-out ranch and a bottling plant that produces “ECO FIZZ.”

Much of the novel is set in and around Bozeman, Montana and it’s here that the old-new contrasts are most apparent. New homes gnaw “through old grain fields toward the Bridger Mountains, one after the other like caterpillars.” Cattlemen sit next to “hippies” at a hole-in-the-wall diner that¹s surely The Stockyard Cafe. One of the books central characters picks up a misguided, anti-government malcontent at a music bar that resembles the Filling Station.

The Cadence of Grass revolves around a family patriarch¹s attempt to control his heirs, even after his demise. The death of Sunny Jim Whitelaw brings out the dysfunction in his family. Sunny Jim, in life a strong-willed dapper Dan, leaves the Whitelaw bottling plant to his wife and daughters on the condition that daughter Evelyn and ambitious son-in-law Paul drop their plans for divorce. Everyone who stands to profit scrambles for influence and wrestles with desires. Evelyn is at the center of it all.

Letting a woman take a leading role is a change for McGuane, whose past books focus on doomed bad-boys and ne’er-do-well males. While these sorts play a role in The Cadence of Grass, it’s Evelyn, and to a lesser extent her sister Natalie and their mother, who are the focus of the book’s central themes.

Creating a novel around a woman is something McGuane’s family life helped inspire. “I have three daughters and a wife and I know more now, maybe, about how women are different than men, how they think differently. I think all this made me move [Evelyn] more to the center of the book than I might have before.”

Reviewers familiar with McGuane’s history of troubled male leads have focused on Paul Crusoe, Evelyn’s estranged rattlesnake of a husband, a character straight out of McGuane¹s earlier books. Paul, with prison time for manslaughter under his belt, is having an affair with his parole officer. He wants to see the ranch subdivided.

McGuane agrees Paul is important, but as second fiddle to his estranged wife. “I just read one review out of New York that said Paul was the main character. I think of Paul as the antagonist, if not the anti-Christ. Evelyn is the protagonist. She’s the central consciousness of the novel.”

While the inheritance scenario shapes the story, it’s the side-trips in which McGuane takes his characters out of their element and into the Montana landscape, that are most revealing. These excursions, as when Evelyn drives off lost in a blizzard and is taken in by a strange, isolated farm family, could easily stand alone. In them, McGuane makes his best points about changing cultures standing shoulder­to-shoulder in our part of the country

McGuane has seen a host of generational and cultural shifts during his thirty-three years in Montana and his own life embraces facets of both old and new cultures. “Life in the West is changing. There’s a changing arc of relationship between the generations, a new century with a move into a new society. If there was a generational conflict in my grandparent’s day it wasn’t that they were moving into a new society. They continued to lead the lives their parents led.

“Now [in Montana] we have the famous dichotomy of old and new West. It’s the demographic things that are assailing us, things like the population turnover. We see people growing up on ranches that want to join rock bands. They’re making a bigger leap than the generations before them.”

McGuane’s previous novels dating back some thirty years make good use of old and new West conflicts. In 1992’s Nothing But Blue Skies, old and new Montana values battle to a draw as the book’s anti-hero, Frank Copenhaver, a businessman involved in livestock and real estate, tries to win back his estranged wife and bridge a generation gap with his daughter. Ten years later The Cadence of Grass, sees old and new ways seeking an uneasy truce as its characters pursue Sunny Jim’s legacy.

McGuane often turns notions of Western stereotypes and old-new conflict inside out. In Nothing But Blue Skies, Frank Copehaver’s young daughter runs off with notorious, not-so-young property-rights advocate Lane Lawlor, a crank who stirs audiences with declarations of “Montana is not a zoo” and “Why do these out-of-staters want us to have a system in Montana which has failed in Russia?” Lawlor wants Montana to dam its waterways at the state line. “If you are unlucky enough to run into someone who wants those rivers flowing elsewhere,” spouts Lawlor to a captive audience, “gut-shoot them at the border.”

McGuane doesn’t exactly deny that Lawlor types exist. “There’s this footloose libertarian movement running through the West and running through the administration and I don’t think it bodes well for the natural world,” he says.

McGuane says that the polarization between Montanans is as great as he’s seen it during his time here. The tension surfaces in Cadence when Evelyn, stuck in a blizzard, doesn’t know if she should trust the four men in camouflage who advance on her snow-bound car or flee.

The state’s changing demographics, he says, explain why Montanans are split between native and new-comer, old and new economies, roads and roadless supporters. “There’s lots of ill will between the sectors. More than half the state is losing population. And the other part is not changing numerically so much as qualitatively. The media doesn’t address these issues. What they talk about is celebrities. They don’t talk about tax flight, or the kids who’ve been through our schools. They don’t talk about the new waves of Christian fundamentalists. Instead, they focus on some movie star settling in. It¹s a non-reality for the folks in Montana.”

“Clearly we have to find common ground among the various factions in Montana, though I’ve not found a lot of progress in that direction. Some of the disagreements we face are insurmountable. We have this anti-government feeling in Montana agriculture but without government subsidies, Montana agriculture would not stand on its own. I¹m not sure how an industry like that can control our culture. At the same time, I don’t think the only solution is to leave the farms and ranches and go to work in the tourist industry. There are great mistakes to be made on both sides of the issue.”

That includes the environmental side. “The mistaken idea that farmers have nothing in common with environmentalists can be blamed on environmental elitism. We shouldn’t have to feel guilty when making our intentions clear or when finding common ground with those with whom we disagree.”

Appropriately, McGuane has fueled his environmental activism with opinions that are somewhat pragmatic. He has been on the board of the Craighead Institute and says he¹s currently involved with American Rivers and The Wild Salmon Center, a Portland-based, international organization seeking to save salmon migration routes in North America and Asia.

“I guess I get involved because I take so much from the natural world in terms of happiness that I feel I should do something in return,” he explains.

McGuane’s love for the natural world extends to horses, particularly cutting horses, and fishing. During the years between his last novel, McGuane wrote about both. His 1999 collection of essays, Some Horses (The Lyons Press), is a sort of steeds-I’ve-known that delves as deeply into four-legged behavior as any of his novels delve into human behavior.

This pairing of man and horse, McGuane and Montana, began in 1967 when he arrived from Michigan to work at the ranch of a girlfriend’s father. “But I didn’t get crazed about horses until I was living in Deep Creek in the late ‘60s. I always appreciated athletic skills and I thought roping would be a marvelous sport at the time. I just like the animals. It’s arbitrary really that it’s horses. It could have been cats.”

Another of McGuane¹s essay collections, The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (Knopf, Vintage Paperback), is a thoughtful consideration of time spent in Montana creeks, the Florida Keys and other locations around the globe. At the heart of the book is its deep respect for the creatures and the waters they inhabit.

But this isn’t heartfelt nature writing. McGuane’s cynical wit and dark sense of comedy colors the new novel just as it did his earlier ones. The book’s most ironic statement comes from Paul who indulges visions of development: “Money brings us closer to nature,” he declares.

“I thought it was one of the most poisonous remarks Paul could make,” McGuane explains. “I absolutely don’t believe that myself. But it is one of the floating fallacies in our world. Lots of people who acquire nature do it for economic reasons and they don’t seem to have much time to go there once the closing’s signed. I know ranchers who spend some fourteen days a year on their place.”

McGuane wants it known he doesn’t consider himself a real rancher. “I make the distinction that what I do is not real ranching. Real ranching is something that doesn’t leave much time for writing novels. It¹s a brutal job. You have to run so many cows in today’s world to make it. I personally can’t imagine how you¹d do with less than 500 cows. You’d be tied up all the time.”

Early in Cadence, Evelyn suggests that veteran rancher Bill Champion kept cattle just so he had an excuse to have horses. McGuane, who runs 200 yearlings and claims to do ranch work every day, says his own interest in ranching is a little deeper than rationalizing a passion for horses. “If you have land in this high desert climate you have to do something to cut-down on fires. Grazing is good for that. I¹ve always known ranchers and been interested in cattle culture. But it’s partly true that I¹m most interested in horses. ”

At one time, McGuane’s interests included movie-making. In the ‘70s, he built a reputation in Hollywood for his offbeat scripts. His screenplay for Rancho Deluxe, a cult favorite, starred Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterson with music by Jimmy Buffett. He directed Peter Fonda, Burgess Meredith and Warren Oates in 92 In the Shade, the story of warring charter boat captains in the Florida Keys based on his novel. He was connected for a time with Rancho Deluxe leading lady Elizabeth Ashley and was married to Margot Kidder. He wrote The Missouri Breaks, the twisted and infamous Western that starred Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Frederic Forrest. The film was badly received at release and considered a box-office flop. But time has seen its stake rise, due in part to the fact that 21st century audiences can better stomach the idea of bounty-hunter Brando wearing a dress than audiences could in 1976.

“I don’t miss those days,” McGuane says of his movie business experience. “But they were good days. In terms of going back to film making world, it’s not there for me to go back to. It’s very different now. In the ‘70s, the business was so abstract. It was the OK Corral. You could persuade people on your knees to do your project. Now it’s done by committee. It¹s like working for Enron.”

McGuane says it’s difficult for writers in the West to be taken seriously by the East Coast publishing establishment. “I think there are a lot of enlightened people in the publishing industry who know what goes on. But in general it stands to reason that people in the Northeast are interested in their own part of the country. It¹s like that Saul Steinberg cartoon the New Yorker ran looking across New York City to California with nothing in between. That’s a very bitter joke. When H.L. Mencken said he didn’t care about Willa Cather because he didn¹t care about Nebraska he referred to a truth. It’s why I think people in the East are less interested in the West. Unfortunately, the whole [publishing] industry is back there.”

Currently, the East Coast publishing industry is waiting for McGuane’s next effort, this one produced on the new laptop. “It will be a very different novel. I’ve been working on it intermittently for the last six months and should finish in two years. I’m such an improvisational writer that I would be trying to fool you if I told you what it’s about.” –Cabbage Rabbit

Photo of Thomas McGuane © Audrey Hall, courtesy of Knopf

A version of this interview was published in Tributary in 2002 and was reprinted in Conversations with Thomas McGuane, University Press of Mississippi, edited by Beef Torrey