Month: April 2009

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Go Wes

It took me some time to get over my rage at Wes Anderson and learn to enjoy the quirky preciosity of his movies. Now I’m good with him. I’m still trying to suss out what I expect from movies, novels and, well, art in general, so I’m not going to hold my dissatisfactions with his storytelling against him. And far be it from me to goof on someone else for being precious.

Now that I’ve checked out the five installments of Matt Zoller-Seitz’s analysis of Anderson’s work and influences, The Substance of Style (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), I appreciate Anderson a lot more.

I also learned a bunch about Hal Ashby (the subject of part 3), who had an awfully good 10-year run of movies: The Landlord, Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home and Being There.

(Note: If you go to these articles, click on the video links, because those include the entire text of each installment, along with great images and movie clips to illustrate MZS’s points.)

(Bonus! It’s Wes Anderson without Wes Anderson, but with Rachel Weisz!)

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0-fer of the week: Pulitzer edition

Evidently, this year’s Pulitzer Awards come out soon. In fact, they may’ve been awarded already. I’m not really sure, because I don’t give a crap about awards.

But, so, hey, I came across a link to this AbeBooks list of the Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels, and guess what?

I haven’t read a single book on this list! In fact, I haven’t read any other work by any of the authors on the list, except for one!

That would be Steven Millhauser, because David Gates recommended one of his books to me. This recommendation was from our first conversation a dozen years ago, and I realize now that I never actually read more than a couple pages of that book, although it looked promising.

It’s Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, and now that I think about it,  it might make a good post-Salinger read for me. I’ll try to get to it this summertime and let you know.

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Roman Gods

I’m working my way through Plutarch’s Lives (or Parallel Lives, if you like). I decided not to challenge myself to blog about it, the way I did with Montaigne, because I didn’t like the way that made me rush through some of the essays in an attempt to compress/distill them. I’m still glad I made my way through his work, but I need to revisit many of them. With Plutarch, I’ll share what I can, but I make no promises.

Anyway, while reading the life of Numa Pompilius, the successor to Romulus as king of Rome, I came across this wonderful passage:

To the god Terminus, or Boundary, they offer to this day both public and private sacrifices, upon the borders and stone-marks of their land; living victims now, though anciently those sacrifices were solemnized without blood; for Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries, who watched over peace, and testified to fair dealing, should have no concern with blood.

It is very clear that it was this king who first prescribed bounds to the territory of Rome; for Romulus would but have openly betrayed how much he had encroached on his neighbors’ lands, had he ever set limits to his own; for boundaries are, indeed, a defense to those who choose to observe them, but are only a testimony against the dishonesty of those who break them.

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Notes from Vegas: White Stripes

Last night, I took my car out to the In-N-Out Burger on Tropicana Blvd. Rather than return via I-15, I decided to drive down the strip, starting around Circus Circus and the MGM Grand. My hotel is at the far end of the strip, near the Space Needle building, the Stratosphere, and my conference is nowhere near the strip, so this was likely the only opportunity I’d get to drive through and try to pick up some impressions. I’m still working on processing it all, but I’m having a tough time of it.

I arrived in Vegas on a Saturday evening once, and the cab ride to my hotel was impossible due to strip-traffic. This time, there wasn’t much volume. I chalk it up to Monday night slowdown, rather than fiscalpocalypse.

The funny thing about having a car on this trip is that I never drove in Vegas before, so I never noticed that the streets don’t have stripes painted to demarcate the lanes. They have little raised reflectors, but no white lines. (This made my drive in from the airport — in which I had a blinding headache and the sun was just a few minutes from descending behind the mountains — kinda frightening.)

Anyway, the reason I’m writing is because I passed the City Center project during this trip. It consists of a bunch of sleek towers and a big-ass mall. I saw it around 18 months earlier during this trip. It’s been in the news lately because of financing problems; a fund in Dubai doesn’t want to cover to giant cost overruns in order to finish a luxury hotel/condo/casino/mall complex at a time when no one has money.

After seeing the silly jagged multi-planar design for the front (mall) of the Center, I’m hoping they pulled out after developing taste. Here’s an interview with the architect of this grotesquerie, Daniel Liebeskind, on how to rethink a mall or something.

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What It Is: 4/20/09

What I’m reading: Finished Antony and Cleopatra, recaptured my comic-geek youth with the Ambush Bug reprint collection, and finished Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus.

What I’m listening to: A mix I made called Dropsical Meatwave. Because I’m like that.

What I’m watching: Chocolate, which needed less buildup and more fight scenes. The mishap outtakes in the closing credits demonstrate that more fight scenes would have led to fatalities, so hey. I also re-watched the first three episodes of the first season of The Wire on my flight out to Vegas. What an amazing show.

What I’m drinking: Not much. I’m getting tired liver after a short spring training.

What Rufus is up to: Enjoying the warm weather, going to a greyhound meet & greet (with pix) on Saturday and taking his weekly hike up in Wawayanda State Park (no pix)!

Where I’m going: Las Vegas, baby.

What I’m happy about: I may get to hit In-N-Out Burger while I’m here! (I’m easy.) Also, I’m still pretty ecstatic that I took this pic. (Again, I’m easy.)

What I’m sad about: I had this terrible foreboding the moment I woke up on Sunday, the day of my flight out here. I haven’t had that sort of vibe in a long time. Of course, the flight turned out fine and I even drove in Vegas for the first time (it’s my 5th trip here, I think). Interestingly, they don’t seem to paint stripes on the highway or the major roads. This made the drive interesting. To my credit, I took my GPS unit along and let it guide me out to the hotel.

What I’m worried about: Mortality, evidently. And driving a low-slung Pontiac around Las Vegas.

What I’m pondering: Whether The Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” (the song from the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are) is this alt-generation’s “Do You Realize??” or their “November Rain.”

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Save Our Newspapers!

. . . Otherwise, where will we get such awesome journalism as this NYTimes article about how male movie actors are getting fat as they get older?

A scene from the new journalistic thriller “State of Play” says it all.

Jeff Daniels, as the politician George Fergus, squares off with Russell Crowe, as the pen-wielding journalist Cal McAffrey.

Two men. One notebook. Four chins.

Hollywood’s pool of leading men is getting larger — and not necessarily in a good way.

The best part — and there are plenty of good parts, including the bit about how today’s aging male leads might be thinner if they just smoked cigarettes, like Humphrey Bogart (dead at 57 from throat cancer), Clark Gable (dead at 59 from a sudden heart attack), and James Stewart (dead at 264 from being a nice guy) — is that the article ends by treating an utterly implausible quote for a Hollywood PR rep at face value!

[Russell Crowe] might want to get some diet advice from Jason Segel.

Mr. Segel, 29, was fairly hefty in “I Love You, Man,” a comedy released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks in March. But his face looked surprisingly thin on billboards advertising the film.

The advertising photos were done some weeks after the film shoot, with a slimmer Mr. Segel, said Katie Martin Kelley, a publicity executive with Paramount. “There was no retouching done,” Ms. Kelley said.

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Sprung

Looks like someone forgot to post today! I’d better rectify that with a photoset (with oddball commentary) of this evening’s walk! Why don’t you click through the picture and go to the set?