BREAKING NEWS
Sunday Times selects Robert Redford: The Biography by Michael Feeney Callan
as one of its Best Books of 2011
(Source: Sunday Times Culture Supplement November 27, 2011)
“In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme...
Audacity - reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
Audacity - reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel - Art.”
Herman Melville, Art
A LETTER FROM MICHAEL: THE WRITER'S LIFE
CURATING Part 1: WEBCASTING FROM THE RABBIT HOLE
The great privilege of creativity is the challenge to change things. On a personal level it has been invigorating to move from the hectic schedule of promoting my biography of Robert Redford (the joyful coast-to-coast US tour for Random House this summer), to writing and directing again for film. And the “film” this time is something very unique and ambitious which owes its origins to my 15 years in Redford’s world. Redford’s Sundance was all about providing support for independent filmmakers. When I finished the marathon book, my focus was with the role and rights of creativity. Out of that catalytic moment came the creation of BOBCOM.com, the online Birth of Brilliance Community. Entertainment media are fast-changing with the growth of IT science and this, in turn, affects the capacity of the arts. “Convergence” is the new buzz word. It simply means the fusing of the new technologies with conventional production, broadcast and distribution paradigms. The internet is the revolution. It is the most powerful democratic tool ever invented, and its value for artists is immense. BOBCOM.com offers a multi-media platform to liberate artists. Initially it features musicians and is an unabashed tackle upon the early-established websites that continue institutional trends of over-exploiting the artist; ultimately, BOBCOM aims to create programmes for artists in other media, in the visual arts and in writing. BOBCOM launched with an Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass carnival on Bobfire Night, November 1, 2010, at Hoxton Square in London, promising a manifesto of change and new-style opportunities for emerging talent. In the twelve months that followed, we placed a new band in Abbey Road Studios to record an album, placed four acts in our BOBCOM Channel 4 television series and launched a 7-hour live-streamed celebration of fifty years of the Beatles at the Cavern. To round off our first year, at Hallowe’en 2011 we partnered with the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts to launch a groundbreaking webcast, The 2UBE, which is presented monthly on BOBCOM.com. For me personally the multi-layered project is a chance to actualise the promise of one of my heroes, Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland not only promoted transcendent joy in the exercise of imagination, but waved an important flag for neglected voices - in his case, the wisdom of seen-but-not-heard Victorian teens. Adopting an Alice figure as BOBCOM’s poster girl was a given but, as writer-director of the film and promotional elements of our project, it has been a blast embedding the acrostics and culture-stimulating tricks that Carroll stuck in Alice. The internet, I firmly believe, needn’t be semi-literate slurry. It’s a scribble board, for sure. But because it is it represents the perfect canvas for new artists to take back control. My dedication in the months to come will be to push the boundaries of BOBCOM to inspire, support and showcase new artists who are free to say what they say and do what they do. The world needs change.
CURATING Part 2: WRITING IN THE COMMON ROOM
Next spring sees Vintage in the US publish my book on Robert Redford. I’ve been asked continually how I evaluate the reviews, so many of which have been too flattering by far to counterbalance, I suppose, the naysayers. Analysing popular mythology, I always say, is tricky. The iconographic image of pop celebrity is so entrenched and dominant that even the great and good get swayed. It was shocking, for instance, to see an esteemed journal like the Los Angeles Times frame its review in factual inaccuracies, for which they immediately published (at my demand) a retraction (convention being what it is, they refused the more appropriate apology). Simply, the reviewer had recited untruths about Redford’s alleged baseball scholarship, the kind of persistent Hollywood hype invention my book had carefully disassembled. So, despite painstaking research over 15 years and the the most meticulously sought corroboration of facts, popular journalism was insistent on maintaining the falsehood. That’s a tough reality to face. Tough too was the opinion voiced by the New York Post, who believed I was complicit in maintaining Redford’s iconography, implying a weakness or inadequacy in character analysis. In this instance, my sentiments concur. Maureen Callaghan’s insightful review in the Post was accurate: complicity was involved, since I sought - and got - Redford’s cooperation in preparing the book, and access to his personal papers. Such cooperation, however, comes with a price and the eagle-eyed reader will see the subtext. Humphrey Carpenter once lamented that his authorised biography of Benjamin Britten was hamstrung by the stories he was not permitted to tell. Which is not to say I lost kinship or empathy with my subject. Robert Redford is a significant artist, as much as essayist of Americana as Walt Whitman, in my view. And I approached analysis of his life and work with the main aim of delineating the organic growth of a distinct curatorial American viewpoint. This, I think, several reviewers, from the Scott Eyman of The Wall Street Journal to the Daily Mail’s Bryan Forbes, accurately detected and considered. And what of the others, the some and several who found not enough titillation or sensationalism? I’m reminded of - again - my hero, Lewis Carroll’s wry observation of curatorial life in the common room:
“It is not the happy lot of every curator to be criticised, not only by the resident members of the Common Room, but also by distant correspondents. I have received, during the past year, a long series of letters from one writer, of a highly critical - not to say hostile - tendency. These have been fired off to me with monotonous regularity, having all the persistency - without the pathos - of minute-guns .... What most amuses me in this series of projectiles is the novel view it gives me of my position as Curator. I had been weak enough to picture myself as a well-worked and slightly worried individual trying, to the best of his poor judgement, to do his duty to his friends who had entrusted their Common Room to his care - acknowledging responsibility to those fiends as a body, but most certainly NOT to single members of that body, still less to outside critics - and, BEHOLD, I find I am a dark conspirator, going about in cloak and domino, with daggers and detonators, and withal liable to be put in the dark and lectured by any soi-disant judge that chooses to don the wig and gown! All this is, as Tennyson says, ‘sweet and strange to me.’”
Wonderland indeedy.
Read the reviews on the BOOKS tab.
SCRAPBOOK: REDFORD TOUR & DIRECTING BOBCOM
Pages from Mike’s album: Top, left to right: The Redford book tour 1) The American Film Institute Theater, Silver Spring, Maryland, June, 2011; 2) On stage at the AFI, discussing the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; 3) Book signings in San Francisco, June, 2011 . Second Row, l to r: At work on BOBCOM 1) In the control room in Abbey Road Studios with producer Steve Levine and Banned Sauce; 2) Directing BOBCOM's poster lady Honey Cleaver in Nottingham Forrest, March 2011; 3) Pre-film planning with Pete and Roag Best, at the Casbah Club, Liverpool, July 2011. Bottom Row, l to r: BOBCOM's friends and family 1) With the legendary Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall, September, 2011; 2) With Pete Best and brother Roag, July 2011; 3) With John Lennon's Quarrymen at St Peter's Church Hall, Woolton, the venue where John met Paul, July 2011.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Michael continues to work on a new collection of poetry, which will be published shortly. The Magical Triangle will contain all new poems, written in the period from 2003-2011. Below is a sampler from the work in progress.
DOUGLAS SIRK WITH MY MOTHER AND SON
The span of time a folded fan across an elderly lady’s lap or boys’ toy
The soft and downy horizon, a deer in snow and Jane Wyman’s apple cheeks
So sit down here, surrounded by the technology and phone accounts of
a half a century, sit with Rollo or fruit pastilles and while away the
astonished truth of her and him and Rock and all that came about
Douglas Sirk, anonymously in Lugano by the brown autumnal lake,
By the statues of the undebated greats like Ella, by the stagnant water
off the Roman Rhone. The wind, the harvest, the screen and mezzanine,
the pre-revolutionary politics and Restoration inward look,
the Freud and fan and all the earnest fireside stuff that
substitutes possession.
Aside you I wish to hold your hand, generations popping like
hottub corn, the Christmas beef, the laughing cavaliers: us always.
I wish to hold your hand but, no matter, Douglas Sirk is between us
holding us all, pre and post and all and ever.
Snow falls and - this incantation answered - it is indeed December.
NOTES FROM A MUNICIPAL FLOWER BED
Parking. Larking on old shores. The mill. The floss of duties. Wait. Go.
The cross. We bear. The striped tiger crossing. The old hands. The boys.
School stripes. Bars. Chocolate wrappers on a dull bookmaker wind.
The drill. The dill drill. The sliding by of busses. Omni. The steam.
Press. The queuey queue for bread or bolls. The cotton. The rotten cotton.
Windows. The sly shine. Ironised women. Mannequins. Promises.
The new. The shiny shutter. The close. The clothes horse. Closing time.
The elongated river. Dry. The tired mouth. The slow foot. The quake.
Rumble. The city mail. Chain mail. Distended duck. A signal sense. Ease.
At last. The park. The part park. The shallow grave. Verdant hush. Bush.
Waves. Wavy bush. The stiff iris. The yellow. The deck. The red. The white.
Accordance with. Sway. Stay. Stop here. A young conversation. The then.
Here and now continuing. Unpark.
ODE TO THE COMMUNITY
1. She goes out
Can of oil beside the milk. A ring of calcium on the step. Knickers
in the hidden air behind a lilac tree. And above like god the spiral
tower of the Mace.
When she leaves she is dressed for Verdi, up and styled (a little nerdy),
But the morning’s impositions are stemmed by a one-pound charity
book of humanities by Betty Ball. Scrunch, scuff the heelless Kelly,
the Kelly bag, the waist of jelly. Comes along the corner shop
and takes persistence up a notch to talk to the kid with the cleft pallet.
There are innumerable pieces of paper to be processed because
it is the twenty-second of March.
Out on the coast road her place holds firm pulling at her ankles like
the kraken; sliding out like a skater on an icy winter night she
slides towards town, sliding to the toll remorseless full of dates but sliding.
She has become herself by habit but is aware of the changes in
every finger and toe.
The cemented walls, cheap garrison walls, are tired and crumbling
like the dandruff that pares off her flesh, leaving her in council bushes
To stop and weep for flesh left back, to take a step off the track to
forgo the ambush and wait at a trailer or skip a light or stop a child:
is impossible conjunction, like the wrong newspaper.
It says here:
2. She goes back
O let me lie, let me lie on silk and eat the glass that’s full of me.
O let me.
HELICOPTER IN THE NIGHT
The city is raging in labour, its walls are sand
The hot night is ringing with the devil’s laughter
And William Caxton is burning his hidden books.
The cold of sound presses hard on frayed and fragile windows
Widows fuss for bankbooks in tea kettles
Cats eat corn, babies whine, the white light of a 400 watt bulb.
The sea goes quiet. Fish stall. An arc of anger
Raking across the universe, fahrenheit 452, wr 104, the inferno
It is at last the locust wave, the pestilence, the
unstoppable fear that answers every question.
There’s a banshee on my lawn known to me.
Please feel free to contact Michael Feeney Callan for any question or comment.
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mfcallan
Finishing revised updated text for new French edition of my book Sean Connery: The Biography for Nouveau Monde Editions in Paris.
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mfcallan
Recommended read: Ritual by David Pinner. Basis for Shaffer's The Wicker Man?
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mfcallan
Thank you for all the Happy Birthday dues!!!
BOBCOM.com, the multi-platform support initiative for new artists co-founded by Michael has announced a venture partnership with LIPA, the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, to broadcast monthly programmes featuring emerging talent on The 2UBE live from LIPA. The premier webcast directed by Michael was transmitted on Friday, October 28. View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc9BqGhyfG0
BOOKS
Michael's new poetry collection, The Magic Triangle, will be announced for publication shortly. Watch this space.
Michael's biography of Robert Redford, a New York Times' Bestseller, will be published in paperback by Vintage in the US on May 1. The hardback version is currently in its third printing.
Michael's US tour fo his book Robert Redford: The Biography and the new multi-media culture platform BOBCOM.com covered several cities. Michael spoke at the American Film Institute theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland; the Palm Springs International Film Society; the King's English in Salt Lake City; Book Passage in Corte Madera, California; Cinema Arts Centre on Long Island; and theatre 92Y Tribeca, among other venues.
Grupo Planeta in Spain has published Michael's book on Redford. Polish and Hungarian editions have also been issued.
Thorndike Press in the US has issued the large print version of the Redford biography, available via Gale, Cengage Learning, or from Amazon.com
The 14-disc Random House audio version of Robert Redford: The Biography, read by Mark Deakins (Star Trek: Voyager; Buffy the Vampire Slayer), is now on sale.
WEBCAST/RADIO/TELEVISION
Michael is interviewed by Music-News, the online culture news service, at the Cavern, Liverpool, during BOBCOM's summer Magical History Tour production.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCQ-CJjXshA
Michael appeared on Channel 9's Weekend Today Show in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday, July 10, discussing Robert Redford and the inspiration for WWW.BOBCOM.COM.
Michael was interviewed on June 15 on CBS affiliate Local2KPSP television about his work with Robert Redford, for the upcoming Palm Springs Film Society celebration of the new book. See www.kpsplocal2.com
Michael appeared on The Morning Show on TV3 Ireland on June 3, 2011 to discuss the launch of his Redford book in the UK and the progress of WWW.BOBCOM.COM. See TV3/The Morning Show and after the two short adverts scroll on to 12:40.
Michael featured on the arts show Arena on RTE Radio 1 on Monday February 28th, discussing WWW.BOBCOM.COM and his Channel 4 Sounds from the Cities television series.
RECENT PRINT INTERVIEWS
Michael discusses Robert Redford and WWW.BOBCOM.COM in a revealing interview. See The Sunday Times online (Subscription £1).
Michael discusses WWW.BOBCOM.COM, his new website, designed for immediate empowerment of disenfranchised musicians. See Irish Independent link here.
Michael recalls Robert Redford's time in Dublin while working together on Robert Redford: The Biography. See Irish Independent.
Michael guest writes for Vanity Fair, revealing the stubborn vision that drove All The President's Men to Oscar glory. See Vanity Fair.
Michael guest writes for GQ Magazine and picks his top ten underrated Robert Redford classic movies. See GQ Magazine.
The online magazine Hot Brands Cool Places interviews Michael about BOBCOM and Robert Redford and also reviews Robert Redford: The Biography. See Hot Brands Cool Places.
Michael discusses BOBCOM.COM with Erik Petersen of the Nottingham Post. See Nottingham Post.
The online magazine, Faux, interviews Michael about the founding of BOBCOM.COM. See Faux Magazine.
DIRECTING
In July Michael directed the homage to the Beatles, BOBCOM's Magical History Tour, which included a surreal roadtrip, interviews by Michael with Pete Best and the Quarrymen and a 7-hour live show from the Cavern. The show featured music from new BOBCOM talent and from LIPA, the esteemed Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. In October it was announced that LIPA and BOBCOM had formed a venture partnership to webcast LIPA's The 2UBE, a monthly 2-hour series live from the Institute. The premier episode directed by Michael included music by Kodiak, Coffee and Cakes at Funerals, Laura James, Sophie Cooke, Alexander Hulme, Robert Jordan and Pearl and the Puppets. Subsequent episodes directed by Michael were broadcast on November 25 and December 17 and featured a host of headline talent, LIPA alumni and BOBCOM's Zemmy and Jody Cooper.
ART
A new collection of oil paintings entitled Gardening and exploring the iconography of Sir John Tenniel, Randolph Caldecott, Ernest Shepherd and Harry Furniss in modern suburbia is close to completion. The exhibitions in Dublin and London will be announced shortly.
