Month: September 2006

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Unrequired Reading

No one will pay to see Scarlett Johanson. You know your career’s in trouble when you’re being compared to Ben Affleck:

Years back, it was Eddie Murphy, who went from mega-star to loser when he churned out such bombs as Pluto Nash and I Spy before recovering his stroke. Kevin Costner still seems to be in the penalty box, although his upcoming action film, The Guardian, may change that. And there’s the sad story of Ben Affleck: good-looking, kind-hearted, talented, and death to just about any film he’s in. (Remember 2004’s back-to-back stinkers, Saving Christmas and Jersey Girl?)

Well, welcome to box-office hell, Scarlett. An intelligent woman with some two dozen films to her credit, Johansson, 21, has everything that Hollywood wants in its starlets. She’s charming and she genuinely can act. Better yet, she’s drop-dead gorgeous. But of late, she seems to inject poison into just about every film that has her name in the credits.

I’m very disappointed that he didn’t make a comment about Kevin Costner finding his stroke.

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Pimp my kippah. (thanks, Sirk!)

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ESPN had the very stupid idea that people would buy cell phones for a network operated by ESPN, rather than Cingular or Verizon or somebody. It failed.

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Idiocracy will be the next cult classic.

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In grad school, I subscribed to the economy theory of liver destruction: If you’re going to get drunk, drink malt liquor. You can’t get more messed up for $1.99.

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Dubai’s making great strides in its efforts at becoming a free-trade zone. Of course, I’ll never be allowed to set foot there, since I’m a Jew.

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When I visit someone’s home, the first thing I look for is the host’s bookshelf. So does Jay Parini:

What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.

Thanks to Delicious Library, you can check out mine.

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And I’ve decided to take Little, Big with me to Paris. I’ll letcha know how it goes.

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The Grateful Persian

My other point of pride is how quickly and how well some of my dear readers (and great friends) offered up resources to help out The Brooding Persian. I forwarded everyone’s messages to him, and he was enormously grateful. He’s going to try to follow through with our advice and see where it gets him.

Thanks to everybody who pitched in on this. I’m proud to have such good and caring friends.

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Made it!

Maybe (?) it’s dweebish to take pride in being able to help put on a good pharmaceutical outsourcing conference, but it’s an awfully good feeling when an event works out as well this one has.

The first day of the event is the more stressful one: We had 130 companies at the one-day tabletop exhibition and more than 300 attendees in the house for the conference sessions (between sessions, we had events in the exhibit hall, so the attendees could learn about the exhibitors and do business). It’s basically a four-person operation, with some day-of-show help from some of our office staff.

The buildup is pretty harrowing for us, knowing that more than 500 people are on site because of the strength of the brand 0f our magazine. But the big day was a rousing success. The exhibitors were ecstatic with the quality of the leads they were getting from the attendees, while the attendees loved the presentations we put together (I take a little more pride in that part, since this was the first year I was largely responsible for organizing the presenters and topics).

Anyway, I know this is coming off as a rah-rah horn-self-tooting, but I feel awfully good about how well it all turned out. Exhibitors were seeking us out at the cocktail reception after the show, to tell us they wanted to sign up for next year’s event now. It takes months of preparation that still leaves plenty of last-minute stress, and it’s a great feeling when everyone else is happy with the results.

Now, on to Paris, for a conference about 9 bazillion times bigger than this one.

(I’ll try to post some Unrequired Reading this afternoon, when I’m home.)

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Big Easy

In honor of the Saints’ return to New Orleans, I made a dirty martini for Amy with some “Cajun infused olives” that we picked up this weekend (Amy accented it with a little Tony Chachere’s).

If I didn’t have this crazy work schedule this week — big issue, our conference, then another conference — we’d have gone down to NO,LA for a long weekend, capped off with scalped tickets for tonight’s game against the Falcons. I know it’s only one night, but it’s nice to see people flocking into the city again.

Amy’s in heaven, since the Saints are winning and her dream-guy Ed Hochuli is the referee for the game.

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Friend in Need

I’ve got a request for you, dear readers. A friend of mine (the Brooding Persian, whom I met in grad school) is suffering through a psychotic breakdown and an undetermined autoimmune disease (the latter seems to be causing the former, as an organic brain disorder). He’s living in the Seattle area, doesn’t have money, and is describing himself as a “ward of the courts,” on probation after a recent “harassment” arrest that he chalks up to this psychosis.

Here’s the request: do any of you know of any psychiatrists in the Seattle area who might be willing to talk to/evaluate my friend? He mentioned to me that he’s seeing a doctor in a “clinic for the poor.” I don’t want to cast aspersions on the quality of the help that he’s receiving; I just want to get him the best aid possible.

Drop me a line if you have any leads.

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Every Day Is Like Sunday

We missed Jackass Number Two this weekend, as the only theater on the trajectory of our Saturday morning errand-run was showing it at an inopportune time. So we’ll have to catch it later on. I will laugh a bunch if it’s showing in Paris when we arrive next week. During my last trip there, I caught Minority Report in a theater in Montparnasse. The audience stood and applauded at the end of the movie. Between that and the sugar-coated popcorn, I became convinced that the French are actually aliens. With bad taste.

So, instead of Jackass, I treated Amy to another of the bizarre mini-classics of ’90s cinema last night: Funny Bones. She’s an Oliver Platt fan, and may be on her way to becoming a Lee Evans fan (not that there are many movies to build one’s fandom upon, but his work in this, There’s Something About Mary and, to a lesser extent, The Ladies’ Man, is pretty solid). Funny Bones a magical little movie (albeit 20 minutes too long), and we were happy to bail on the ponderousness of The Ice Harvest to get to it.

Most of the movie takes place in Blackpool, England (as Morrissey put it, “a coastal town that they forgot to close down.”), where virtually everyone is a comedy performer. When I first saw the flick in 1996 or so, it put me in mind of Dylan Horrocks’ sublime comic book Hicksville, about a little town in NZ where everyone is an expert on some variety of comics.

In addition to great jobs by Platt & Evans, there are plenty of supporting actors who put in terrific work in this one: Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron, Oliver Reed (briefly), Richard Griffiths (whom we KNEW we’d seen recently, but couldn’t remember where; it turned out to be Withnail & I), the late George Carl and Freddie Davies (whose roles are mixed up in the IMDB entry for the movie).

Interestingly, it got an R rating, for “a scene of tragic violence,” which is a great term. I’m not sure which scene it’s referring to, since there are two violent scenes and each could be taken as tragic. Anyway, it’s a quirky flick (tragic violence aside), but it was a million times better than that Ice Harvest, I’m telling you.

Now, the funny thing about “I’m telling you” is that I tend to tell people to see, read, or listen to a lot of stuff. If I like a book, I’ll buy extra copies to give out (Richard Flanagan should buy me a drink, if we cross paths in Tasmania). But for some reason, I find it pretty difficult to get around to listening to CDs, watching DVDs, or reading books that are lent to me. On the face of it, I would guess it’s simply because I’m an egotistical prig who doesn’t believe that other people’s recommendations are worthwhile.

But, because I’m always trying to compensate for those tendencies, I’m inclined to believe that it’s due to something even more messed up and insidious. I’ve become pretty good at forcing myself to do stuff that my undermind is trying to keep me from doing, but I still “for some reason” never get around to other people’s suggestions or loans.

Fortunately, I’m making a little progress. This weekend, I broke out a book that one of my dear readers (and best friends) sent me as a birthday gift a few years ago: a collection of nonfiction by Bruce Jay Friedman called Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos. I can’t tell you why I didn’t get to it sooner, especially since this buddy of mine has great taste in writing. I can’t tell you why I finally took it off the shelf this weekend, except perhaps because I wanted to read two consecutive books that were blurbed by Steve Martin.

But I can tell you that I’m a retard for not getting to this book earlier. Friedman’s style (at least in his early 1990s writing) is similar to my best work, but a million times better. I feel like I’m learning plenty from the book (not that I’m demonstrating that here), while enjoying the heck out of it.

Throw in some NFL-viewing and some time rearranging my freshly painted home office, and that’s about it for my weekend.

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Unrequired Reading: party like it’s 5767

Happy Jewish New Year, dear readers! In honor of Rosh Hashanah, this week’s Unrequired Reading features a bunch of Jewish-connected links and others that have nothing to do with Judaism.

First, we have Michael Totten’s interview with Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right To Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. He thinks neither of the Lebanon wars is defensible, and provides some good insights into the shifting emotional landscape of Israelis during the most recent war.

If the story about Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the war’s last days proves true, that oughtta get categorized as “really REALLY indefensible.”

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Johnny Knoxville isn’t Jewish , but he gets to celebrate our new year with his new movie’s debut. Here’s an interview with him and Jeff Tremaine, the director of Jackass Number Two.

On Howard Stern this week, Knoxville admitted that he got the idea for getting gored by a bull (watch the trailer) from watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon. We’ll probably see the movie tomorrow, along with a shopping expedition to the new Century 21 store in Paramus, and a White Manna run. Because we’re all about the gracious living.

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For its first season or two, The State was one of the funniest television shows ever (I seem to recall the last season completely melting down in attempts at absurdism that went nowhere, as it its wont). Even though every other series in the world has gone DVD, The State languishes in MTV vaults. Good news: the first season is getting released on iTunes’ video store!

I can legitimately tie this into this week’s Jewy theme because of the great skit in which the cast members were all asked to introduce themselves and make a personal confession, as a way of becoming closer to the audience: “I’m Michael Ian Black. My real name is Schwartz, but I changed it because I’m ashamed of being Jewish.”

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My buddy Ian’s not Jewish, but he IS a chief petty officer! Congrats! Check out the pix from the ceremony!

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Cory Maye’s not Jewish either, but there are probably Jews at the law firm that helped get him off death row, pending a new sentencing hearing. Here’s hoping it’s the first step to springing Maye from prison!

Oh, and the “informant” whose tip led to the botched raid that landed Maye on death row probably doesn’t like Jews. He sure doesn’t like black people.

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Rich people don’t always stay rich. Larry Ellison is Jewish, and he spent a ton of money, but he managed to stay rich:

A raft of e-mail messages and financial documents introduced in a lawsuit that disgruntled shareholders filed against Mr. Ellison and other Oracle executives in 2001, give witness to some of Mr. Ellison’s budgeting practices. (The suit was settled last November and the judge in the matter subsequently unsealed financial documents submitted as exhibits in the case). The documents, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, also show how far Philip E. Simon, an adviser who described himself as Mr. Ellison’s “financial servant,” went in trying to persuade his boss to pay off about $1.2 billion in loans. (Neither Mr. Ellison nor Mr. Simon responded to interview requests for this article).

Mr. Ellison’s ledger around the end of 2000 included annual “lifestyle” spending of about $20 million, the purchase of a Japanese villa for $25 million, a proposed underwater archeology project earmarked for $12 million and his new yacht, budgeted at $194 million (news reports later said that the yacht’s final cost approached $300 million).

“I know you view me as a pessimist,” Mr. Simon wrote Mr. Ellison in an e-mail message in 2002, several months after banks began sounding alarms about Mr. Ellison’s debt. “Maybe you’re right, though I would disagree. Nonetheless, I think it’s imperative that we start to budget and plan. New purchases should be kept to a minimum. We need to establish and execute on a diversification plan to eliminate (yes, eliminate) all debt and build up a significant, conservatively structured, liquid investment portfolio.

“I know you don’t like to discuss this,” Mr. Simon added. “I know this e-mail may/will depress you. View this as a call to arms.”

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During my previous visit to Paris in 2002, I visited some of the monuments and shrines that commemorated the Jews that France shipped out for the camps. There’s plenty of other stuff for us to do this time around, as this BW slideshow sez.

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Sven Nykvist wasn’t Jewish, but he was the cinematographer on several Woody Allen flicks, including one of my favorite movies: Another Woman. (Also, he had an affair with Mia Farrow pre-Woody, which makes their subsequent collaborations just plain weird. On the other hand, Amy & I had exes perform the readings at our wedding, so hey.) He died last week after a long illness.

A few weeks ago, Amy was looking through our Netflix queue, and asked, “What is Light Keeps Me Company and why is it in our queue?”

Yes, she married someone who’s interested in seeing a documentary about a cinematographer. All I can say is, like Rembrandt, Nykvist’s work taught me new ways of seeing light. Rest in peace.

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Tiki culture: something that could bring all the world’s faiths together. Except the ones that prohibit drinking, I guess.

Yo-ho-ho and l’shana tova!

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Unrequited reading

Sorry to be writing less frequently, dear readers. I’m in the midst of a work-crunch of monumental proportions. Gotta finish a giant issue of the magazine by next Wednesday, then help put on our annual conference & exhibition Thursday and Friday, then get on a plane Saturday for a chemical ingredient conference. On the doubleplusgood side, said ingredient conference is in Paris, and my wife’s coming along for the trip.

On the down side, the book I just started, Witold Rybczynski’s City Life, is boring me silly, so I may have to drop it. I enjoy WR’s architecture articles on Slate, but the first 50 pages of this book have been pretty dull and pedantic, especially the second chapter’s extended take on how population size does not say much about the importance of a city. Again and again.

Fortunately, Amazon is about to deliver my copy of Shakespeare Wars, the new book from Ron Rosenbaum. Unfortunately, I don’t want to carry a 640-page hardcover with me overseas. So why don’t you suggest a book for me to read, already?

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Who’s Buried In Grant’s Tome?

I discovered With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant in 1998, as I was walking through a Borders bookstore in a mall. The book was on the New Releases table and its cover — the grimacing face of one of my favorite actors, framed by a cardboard box — caught my eye.

I picked up the hardcover and flipped to the table of contents. It was organized (mostly) by movie, and included a chapter about my favorite bad film, Hudson Hawk. I was tempted to pick it up, but $24.95 was a little steep for me back then. I thought, “I’ll wait for it to get on the best-seller list, then pick it up on discount from Amazon.” [Remember: this is 1998, before Amazon started dropping prices on everydarnbook in stock.]

During the drive home, I thought, “You idiot! That’s book’s never going to become a best-seller! It’s the film diaries of Richard E. Grant, ferchrissakes!”

So, a few days later, I bought a copy at the Montclair Book Center (at a modest 10% discount), and proceeded not to read it for nearly a decade.

Now, it’s not as if I lay down books like bottles of wine, waiting for a maturation process before I ingest them. It’s more to do with a combination of laziness and that whole “worlds enough” business.

During this past summer (technically, it still is summer, but the 40-degree overnight temps last week have put that season to bed), we caught an installment of Higher Definition in which Robert Wilonsky interviewed Grant about his directorial debut, Wah-Wah, a semi-autobiographical take on Grant’s childhood in Swaziland during the British handover.

We thought the movie sounded good, and wanted to go see it, but discovered that it had the most eclectically limited distribution of all time. Each Friday, we’d hit the Showtimes link on its IMDB page, to discover that it was only playing in five far-flung theaters that week: Cedar Rapids, Logan, Bangor, Bismarck and Mineola. The closest it came to NY/NJ was about 3 hours’ drive away. We started to joke about just which out-of-the-way cities it was going to appear in.

As it turned out, the Higher Def episode was a rerun from a month or so earlier, and the film actually HAD shown in Jersey (Montclair, naturally) in May. We’ll wait for video.

During that interview, I mentioned to Amy that I had With Nails downstairs in the library. “Of course you do, darling. He’s your boyfriend,” she said. I didn’t try to argue. She took a break from Don Quixote and granted Grant a chance.

For the next several nights, while we read before turning in, I noticed her trying to suppress her laughter. “Anything I should know about?” I asked the first time.

“You have to read this book,” she told me.

Having recently cleared my slate of snooty-pants highbrow books, I finally read With Nails last week, and she’s right; it’s impossibly entertaining. The main reason for this is Grant’s charming naivete at being ‘Swaz Boy In Hollywood’, but there’s also something special about the era in which it begins (1985). Grant recalls numerous auditions and social occasions where he’s crisscrossing with Branagh, Nighy, Day Lewis, Oldman, Roth, That Other Grant, and other British actors who are busting out in their own careers. When he gets to Hollywood, it’s at the peak of the Guber/Peters era, as budgets first began blowing through the roof.

There are great behind-the-scenes stories of how films can go disastrously wrong (along with a pretty clear illustration of why Pret-a-Porter sucked), and then there’s the absolute epic of how messed up the Hudson Hawk shoot was (it’s the biggest chapter in the book). I can’t begin to convey the mind-blowingness of those anecdotes, which culminated in him and Sandra Bernhard clinging to each other for an island of sanity. Try to wrap yer mind around THAT concept, dear reader.

(Bonus: from his description of the accommodations during the Budapest stage of the shoot, it appears he stayed in the same place I did during my trip there two years ago. Also, from his description of the horrors of those accommodations, it appears the country made some major strides from 1990 to 2004.)

While Grant comes off as a sweet, wide-eyed guy in this book, he doesn’t pull punches with some of his characterizations. Steve Martin, for example, comes off as a good-hearted man who is All Business, contradictory as that may seem. And Grant’s Barbra Streisand story needs to be read to be believed. I mean, it’s tough to believe he’s heterosexual after that one, but hey.

He also takes name-dropping to a new level, but never in the “Saw DeNiro at NoBu last night, AGAIN: yawn” mode. He seems genuinely thrilled about meeting many of his idols, and his description of meeting Tom Waits is perfect:

Everyone else is in smatterings of designer casuals. Mistah Waits arrives straight off an old record cover in a ’64 open-topped Cadillac, with fins, with a funnel of dust trailing down the dirt road. The gravel voice gets out some howdy-doodys and his clothes and hair are crumple-sculpted to him. Doesn’t seem to have a straight bone in his bearing and kills me off with his cool by growing out a compliment for Withnail & I. Out the side of his mouth. Like we might be being spied on by the bailiffs. Him, rolling tobacco and reefer. Winona and I are “We’ve got all your recordings, Tom!!” To which he just heh-hehs.

I’m still undecided about how the arc of the book makes me feel: it covers the career that begins with Withnail & I — which gains him massive amounts of praise and launches him to Hollywood — before moving to a sequence of films directed by some of our finest directors — Altman, Coppola, and Scorsese — and ends with him shooting Spice World. Of course, it’s better than the alternative of not working.

And we do have those Wah-Wah diaries to look forward to.