I saw Synecdoche, New York on Friday afternoon and I’ve spent this weekend trying to parse what I saw, heard and felt. I’ve even been struggling with the metaphor of how it’s affected me; I don’t want to ape the ongoingly-dying lead character by saying it’s infected me like a virus. I think it’s more like ink in water, gently dispersing, ever obscuring.
I don’t feel bad that I can’t come up with the right words. Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis both loved the movie, but neither of them seem to have the vocabulary to approach it. Ebert comes closer in this blog-post about it, but he’s still barking at cats. Robert Wilonsky named it his favorite movie of 2008, but didn’t review it for his paper. He did get in a good interview with writer/director Charlie Kaufman. (Rex Reed’s negative review is pretty funny, in its way.)
I watched Adaptation on Saturday night, in hopes that it would provide some clues into Synecdoche, since it seemed to be the most thematically similar of Mr. Kaufman’s previous screenplays. I was completely wrong, of course. Adaptation is about a man who can’t start, and Synecdoche is about a man who can’t stop. Also, Synecdoche isn’t about writing, but dying. It’s also a million times funnier than Adaptation, and the women are amazing. (Like Ebert, I won’t write about the actors or their performances.) Unfortunately, I caught a 1 p.m. screening, so the other dozen audience members were generally elderly people. They didn’t find it as humorous as I did.
For all the difficulties in the movie, I never felt like I was being sneered at by Mr. Kaufman. It felt more like he was struggling to convey the ineffable, knowing it’s ineffable. I still don’t get why Samantha Morton’s house was on fire, but this isn’t the sort of movie where misreading a symbol will derail your entire experience with it. At least, it wasn’t for me.
I almost drove back into NYC on Saturday to watch it again, but the DVD is coming out on March 10, so I preordered it. I have a feeling that I’ll ramble more about this movie in the next few months.
To celebrate the arrival of my new Kindle (I sold my first-gen model for $270 on Amazon last week), here are a bunch of articles about e-book pricing and why publishers are scared crapless by the example of Apple and iTunes:
Kassia Kroszer, who writes wonderfully about this stuff on her blog, argues that $9.99 is tops for what consumers will pay. I agree, as there are a number of Kindle books that I’ve blown off because they’re priced above that, including the new translation of War & Peace (which I finally bought a minute ago after the price dropped from $22+ to $8.96).
Here’s a publisher at HarpersStudio explaining why paper, printing and binding (PPB) only account for about $2.00 of a book’s price, and therefore why Kindle books need to cost a lot more than $10. It looks like he doesn’t account for bookstore returns in that estimate; overprinting and getting stuck with tons of unsold copies doesn’t occur with an e-verison, of course. And he may be lying.
Jason Epstein still wants a high-speed machine that will make print copies of books on demand. No, seriously. Oh, and good books will be written by demented shut-ins “highly specialized individuals struggling at their desks in deep seclusion and not by linked communities of interest.”
What better day of the week than Wednesday to show off my lack of erudition? In an act of Godelian irrelevance, I’ll try to post a significant 0-fer (as in, “I’ve never read a book, play, story or essay by [x]”) every week.
What I’m reading: Montaigne & Clive James. And this lengthy article by Michael Lewis about Shane Battier and the intangibles on NBA statistics.
What I’m listening to: Some podcasts of the B.S. Report.
What I’m watching:To Die For, Lisa Lampanelli’s HBO special, and the first episode of Dollhouse.
What I’m drinking: Dona Paula Malbec 2007
What Rufus is up to: Celebrating his 4th birthday on Saturday! Happy birthday, Ru! We took him to a dog park to celebrate, but he seemed less interested in the other dogs and more interested in people. Probably because dogs don’t carry dog-treats in their pockets. He also got his hike in on Sunday, so he’s pretty zonky now. Don’t disturb him.
Where I’m going: Nowhere special.
What I’m happy about: Long-ass weekend to go nowhere special!
This month marks the 13th anniversary of one of the dumbest thoughts ever to cross my mind.
I was covering the annual Toy Fair for a trade magazine. Held in February in two buildings on the west side of Madison Square Park in NYC (it’s moved to the Javits Center now, I think), the fair brought together makers of toys, gifts, games and children’s products with distributors and retailers, to hash out orders for the next year. For some exhibitors, it was a big media event, with trade and consumer press conferences for product launches.
On my first day, I rode a cramped elevator to visit a crib-maker whom I needed to interview. Or maybe it was a breast-pump maker. That’s not important now.
What is important is what happened when the elevator reached my floor and the door opened. There was a man in front of me. I would say we were face to face, but he was at least six inches shorter than me. Still, his face was instantly recognizable.
And as we stepped aside to get past each other, I had the dumbest thought ever: “Wow! One of the toy companies actually hired a Gilbert Gottfried impersonator for the event!”
A moment or so later, of course, I thought, “You idiot! No one could make a living as a Gilbert Gottfried impersonator! You just missed your chance to –”
— to what? As I headed to my appointment, I wondered what I would actually have said to Gilbert Gottfried: “Love you on Howard Stern!” “You should’ve got more screen time in Ford Fairlane!” “Can you do that Arthur Godfrey impression for me? Or the senile Groucho Marx?”
I have to admit, I’d have been tongue-tied. Of course, he would’ve been incredibly uncomfortable, too, but that’s little consolation.
* * *
A few months later, at the annual Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association annual show in Dallas, I found myself sitting beside Jean Kasem in an overstuffed food court. She was at the show to promote her line of boutique cribs.
I’d wised up since that February and realized that this was actually Jean Kasem and not an impersonator or robot duplicate. Still, I found myself unable to acknowledge her, although I did have a joke that I simply didn’t have the balls to deliver:
I would have gone into Italian teamster voice and said to this towering, lovely, blonde woman, “I know you! I know who you are! You were on Cheers! Goddamn: Rhea Perlman! Right here at JPMA! Man! That is AWESOME!”
* * *
A year or so earlier, I went to see Bob Mould play at a 400-seat hall at Georgetown. The hall was inside a campus building and there was a long line snaking up the stairs to get to the door. Mould, on the way up the stairs, had to wait beside me on the landing for a few moments, waiting for people to move aside so he could head backstage.
Standing beside him, I thought, “I have no idea what to say right now.” It’s not that I was totally in awe of him, but the first few things I thought to say were inappropriate:
“I really love your music.” – Well, yeah, you’ve paid to see me perform, so I got the idea that you like my stuff.
“Put on a great show tonight!” – Should I? I thought I’d just half-ass it and cheat my paying audience.
“Good luck!” – Why don’t I kick you square in the nuts?
So I just said, “Hey,” and he did the same, and then he went up the stairs.
* * *
I’ve gotten a lot better with this stuff over the years, as I’ve met or bumped into more “famous” people. Part of it stems from realizing that they’re still people. Sometimes, ignorance helps too, like the time I met Frank Miller at a friend’s birthday party. In this case, it helped that we’d been talking for almost half an hour before I realized that he was Frank Miller. A friend of mine admitted that he would have genuflected before Miller all night if he’d been at the party.
But I admit, having adored Miller’s work throughout my teens, that if someone had pointed him out to me beforehand, I probably would’ve either avoided talking to him, or come up with some incredibly elaborate opening comment that would have made him really uncomfortable.
Which brings me to my big question:
What living celebrity (artist, actor, athlete, etc.) would cause you to have an absolute fawning meltdown, and why?
(I don’t mean like my Bob Mould story, where I couldn’t think of anything good. I’m talking Chris Farley meets Paul McCartney level of tonguetied-ness.)
and order a Kindle 2 from Amazon, I’ll get a 10% kickback!
I really like my v.1 Kindle, and the improvements in v.2 aren’t significant enough for me to upgrade, but if you’re on the fence about whether to get one, you can read my rambles about the device in general here, here, and here.
My biggest complaint remains that the store doesn’t have all the semi-obscure (read: less commercial) stuff that I read, esp. that Everyman’s edition of Montaigne.
