At the far end of town Where the Grickle-grass grows And the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows And no birds ever sing excepting old crows ... Is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.
The premise of NBC's new detective series, Awake, is about as high concept as it gets. Jason Isaacs, one of the leads of Showtime's Brotherhood, stars as Michael Britten, who survives a horrible car crash intact. Well, his body is intact — but his mind, or at least his subconscious, is split.
In 1968, Hugh Masekela was not quite 30 years old and though he was in exile from his homeland of South Africa, he seemed ready to become at home on the American jazz and pop markets. That summer, he had scored a number one single, "Grazing in the Grass." A year earlier, he'd been one of the few international performers at the 1967 Monterrey International Pop Festival and had appeared in its D.A. Pennebaker documentary. Yet strangely enough, over the next 45 years Masekela never quite found his sweet spot.
Writer Nick Flynn was working in a homeless shelter in his 20s when his father – an alcoholic and self-proclaimed writer who left when Flynn was a baby – showed up as a client. Flynn wrote about the experience in his 2004 memoir, Another B------- Night in Suck City.
His story is now a movie called Being Flynn, starring Paul Dano as the young Nick Flynn and Robert De Niro as his father, Jonathan.
On Wednesday's Fresh Air, Nick Flynn and Paul Weitz, the film's director, talk about adapting Flynn's memoir for the big screen.
