Kevin in USA Today:
Hey Hey Hey. I’m in USA Today.
They called my book Bookmark This instead of Bookmark Now but whatever.
VBT Returnith
The Virtual Book Tour rides again today.
Calling all Bay Area Photographers:
SFist reports that recently a Bay Area photographer was arrested for taking pictures inside MUNI, our local subway system. The photographer was violating precisely zero laws and since the the MUNI is city property, the taking of pictures is protected by the First Amendment.
In protest, SFist’s editor Jackson West is organizing a “Shoot In” this Saturday at noon at the Emarcadero station. Be there with camera and Muni fare in hand. Details here.
Sunday Morning Shards #23
On my mind and in the reading queue this week. The “Canadian Skye” edition.
*Christo’s Gates have been unfurled, in all their saffron glory, in Central Park. The New York Times has an appraisal.
*R.I.P Arthur Miller. What a genius.
*Why the future of music needs more bands like Wilco.
*The Future of Music Coalition is non-profit organization of musicians, technologists, policy makers and lawyers seeking to discuss these issues in an intelligent and rational manner. I signed up for their newsletter (via Scott Andrew.
*A profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman that doesn’t use the word “pudgy.” How refreshing. (via Heath Row).
*Instatone is a HotorNot-style database of unsigned musicians and songs. Last.FM strikes me as a better way of discovering new music as it filters based on what you already like. But I’m open to other points of view (via Large Hearted Boy).
*The New York Public Library’s Home Library Kit. Comes with databasing software.
*AlterNet give an in-depth look at the acendancy of the right wing.
*Howard Dean will lead the Democratic Party. Anyone found any news analysis of this?
Our next Virtual Book Tour happens Tuesday. Mark your calendars!
It Must Be Me…
But I have an annoying habbit of only feeling luke warm about movies that everyone else I know thinks are the shiznit. I suppose it started with Pulp Fiction which my whole college dorm could not stop raving about. Even my stoner dude neighbors typed up the Samuel Jackson “Ezekiel 25:17” speech and hung it on their front door. I on the other hand felt like I was being told a 2 hour 45 minute joke about people I didn’t know at a party I hadn’t been invited to. And Quinten Tarantino kept filling my drink. And I don’t drink.
Which brings me to the latest crop of you-got-it-I-didn’ts: Two movies that are nominated for several Academy Awards.
Million Dollar Baby. My old friend Justin practically flew out here from Chicago and escorted me in handcuffs to this movie. Suzan and I went, unmanacled, last Friday.
This is a good film, not a great one. Which is exactly how I felt about Mystic River, Clint Eastwood’s previous widely-lauded film. Mystic River, to my mind, is 2 hours of great drama entirely premised on the under-developed, skated over prologue. In publishing terms, the story doesn’t “earn out.” What comes later isn’t jusitfied by what came earlier.
Million Dollar Baby has the reverse problem: Its lead up promises a knockout its conclusion doesn’t deliver. Justin and several other friends have said, repeatedly now, that the last 30 minutes of Million Dollar Baby is like a kick in the gut, a twist you never saw coming and remember long after the film ends. A) I saw it coming from across the sea and B) Because the last 30 minutes played like a foregone conclusion, it made the rest seem rather anticlimatic.
Yes, I still liked it. But it did not change my world. And the expectation with Clint Eastwood now seems to be that every third film of his is a classic.
The Aviator: Suzan raved about this movie. I had an unexpected cancellation after a very busy Thursday and took myself there.
Eh. I expected more. Howard Hughes led one of the most iconic lives of the 20th century yet this treatment of it seems curiously flat and joyless. We see him as a dashing young engineer, movie producer and entrapaneur. We get brief glimpses into the gathering darkness that consumed his later life. Yet we never really are shown what motivated Howard Hughes, what made him a person this compelling or what his influence was. I’m assuming it was vast.
Martin Scorcese has been saying for years that his dream project was a biography of Howard Hughes. At various times, Steven Spielberg was attached to the project. Yet it does not feel like Scorcese brought his A-Game. I didn’t see too many shots that I needed to talk about afterward. His screenplay, usually impecable, seemed amorphous and imprecise.
I admired The Aviator way more than I enjoyed it, the way one would a Barney’s window at Christmas. The whole movie feels like it’s behind glass, cut, burnished and sterile instead of alive.
What did everyone else think? Or is it just me?
Dump Him Beeyatch!
Just in time for valentine’s day, a love advice column from 50 Cent (via Hiphop Blogs).
Mencken Memories:
Mr Torrez pointed me a few days ago to a collection of H.L. Mencken quotes. Known as the “Sage of Baltimore”, Henry Louis Mencken was a newspaper man there in the 1920s and 30s. Legend had it his intelligence was so admired that FDR used to call him from the White House for advice.
Mencken is something of a folk hero in my old hometown. Citizens are rallying to save his house after the City of Baltimore let it fall into disrepair. The local library houses his papers in their own special room. Once a year, on Mencken’s birthday, the open it up to the public. The faithful line up hours ahead of time just to poke through the old man’s stuff.
When I interned at the Baltimore Sun’s editorial desk, Mencken’s bully pulpit, in 1994, I used to ask the writers what they did when they got blocked. Most had a Mencken collection on their desk the same way a Catholic might have a little statue of St. Jude. I made a point of reading a little Mencken every Monday. It felt like putting on his hat.
Gems from the master:
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
Nature abhors a moron.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
The role of the press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
One Sentence Movie Reviews #25
Napoleon Dynamite (2004): It is never a good sign when the DVD commentary is more interesting than the film itself.
Song of the Week #8:
This editon of SOTW features a double shot from The Tubes. If you’re just about my age, you remember a brief period when the Tubes were early MTV darlings with their hits “She’s a Beauty” and “Talk to Ya Later.” If you’re a little older, you probably remember their mercurial lead singer Fee Waybill and their circus antics that even shocked fans in their native San Francisco. Even now, I still hear old-timers laughing about The Tubes and their PT Barnum-inspired numskullery.
Whatever. “Later” and “Beauty” are two delicious hunks of pop craftsmanship, beautifully constructed yet dizzingly alive. Both are about the wrong kind of woman: One who won’t leave after the relationship is long past broke, the other an untouchable goddess, who in this case predicts the tragic allure of Internet porn.
I rediscovered The Tubes in college and promptly forced my roommates to listen to “Later” everytime we went to the grocery store. They became zealots.
Listen in. I defy you not to grin and sing along.
Natty Knitters:
Men are starting to knit, for a number of reasons. My favorite is “to meet chicks.” Oh the lengths we will go (via Smoke and Ashes).