I’ll sit facing the corner in a funny hat

This weekend, I read Benjamin Schwarz’s review in the Atlantic of “Have You Seen . . . ?” A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, David Thomson’s follow-up to his Biographical Dictionary of Film. I’ve never read that earlier book, but I’ve seen enough references to it to figure that it’s kinda canonical in film criticism and bathroom reading. The new book sounded like an entertaining read, with its one-page writeups of a thousand movies (including a couple of TV shows like The Singing Detective and The Sopranos). Wrote Schwarz:

It’s impossible to read this book from cover to cover without being convinced that Hollywood’s greatest achievements are not the monotonously important dramas that so often sucker in Academy voters but the stylish, highly polished entertainments, largely comedies, that endure even though they weren’t made to be lasting. Above all, Thomson prizes wit, charm, and good-natured ease. He’s reached an age, he notes in his appraisal of North by Northwest, when he’d “rather have a great screwball comedy than a profound tragedy. After all, tragedy is all around us and screwball is something only the movies can do.”

On Tuesday, I meandered around the nearby Borders during my lunch-hour, and noticed Mr. Thomson’s book on the new non-fiction table. It’s organized alphabetically by movie title, so I turned to Miller’s Crossing to see what he thought of it. I couldn’t help it, Tom! It’s my nature!

I was gratified to find that he loves the movie, and that several of his comments were in sync with mine. I began skimming through the book to see if he commented on any other of my idiosyncratic faves and fascinators. Sadly, no entries for Another Woman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shallow Grave, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or Three Kings. Still, I thought, this would be a great book to have on hand, one to dip into every so often and read his ideas on movies I liked, didn’t like, or never saw. Exactly the sort of thing I would pick up occasionally and read for an hour at a time.

Of course, we live in the future, so I couldn’t just buy it there. After all, its list price is $40, and I figured Amazon would have it for 30-40% cheaper. I looked it up that evening and saw that Amazon was selling it for $26.37 (34% off). I was about to add it to my wishlist when I noticed two things:

  1. it weighs 3.4 lbs. and is almost 2.5″ thick, and
  2. it’s also available for the Kindle.

Sure, I was a little irked that the Kindle edition sells for $23 — most Kindle books are $10 or cheaper — but it’s got criticism of a thousand flicks, the e-book is searchable by word, and I’ll have it with me wherever I travel. Frankly, that’s worth $23 in my world. It looks like the twin forces of new technology and my desire not to carry lots of stuff around sure has messed with my book-buying habits.

(I just wish Cultural Amnesia — Clive James’ 800-page collection of short biographical essays on 20th century literary, political and artistic personae — had gotten en-Kindle-ized. It would’ve been a good fit for the exact reasons as “Have You Seen . . . ?”, but I gave up waiting last week and bought the paperback for $10.77. Grr.)

Anyway, here’s Mr. Thomson’s review of Miller’s Crossing (I figured out how to copy-and-paste off the Kindle, sorta):

I am not a steadfast enthusiast of the Coen Brothers, and I have given up trying to explain the haphazard movements of their career. But the thing that nags me about their record is Miller’s Crossing, a superb, languid fantasia on the theme of the gangster film that repays endless viewing. It is derived quite plainly from Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, although the script was done by the Coens themselves.

At the heart of the film’s assurance are the dour, glum rhythms of Gabriel Byrne as the “hero” figure who happens to be fucking his friend’s girl. The girl is Marcia Gay Harden, never better and so sexy that you understand why Byrne did not bother to debate the temptation. The friend is Albert Finney, charged with energy and booze in equal parts as the thick-headed crime boss who can’t see a con if it’s a cat curled up on his lap. This broken bond between Byrne and Finney is a good version of the relationship between Ned Beaumont and Paul Madvig in Hammett’s novel. And it’s a shared virtue of both works that they convey the disgust and disbelief in tough men that sees how they can betray each other over a piece of ass. Of course, it is a testament to Harden’s ass that we never question the imperative of the ruinous equation.

The next thing to remark on is the way Canadian studios and locations give such a rich, satisfying air of period and place. We never know, or need to know, the city, but there is nothing shabby or secondhand in the décor, and there’s an eagerness in the look of the film that speaks to a real love of space, furniture, light, and mood. The same pleasure vibrates in the very intricate story structure. There are some who find Miller’s Crossing too clever by half, but I think that misses how far the Gabriel Byrne character recognizes the curse of intelligence that hangs over him and the duty it imposes — of always being driven to nose out the cons of others, while hoping that his own subterfuges are going unnoticed. It’s kill or be killed and the air of life is smartness. Take it or leave it.

There’s more, much more, and I think it centers on the “Schmatta” as played by John Turturro — queer as a coot, a dandy, a coward, and as brave as any coward who takes terrible risks. This could be the finest work of one of our best supporting actors. And don’t forget that he stands out in a movie that includes the adorable Jon Polito and the very frightening Eddie the Dane (J. E. Freeman), not to forget a passing secretary, who is Frances McDormand flashing the camera a quick greedy eye as she minces by.

All of that said, after learning to love the crammed texture and its nearly constant inventiveness, it is the more baffling and disconcerting that the Coens seem so often prepared to deliver films that are enervated and without a single good reason for being made. Do they wake up at night wondering if they were ever really this good, or do they refuse to look at the film again?

Now I wonder if he thought any better of Casino than I did . . . ?

UPDATE: I do have a significant complaint about the Kindle edition of this book. There should be a table of contents with hyperlinks to each movie. Grr.

What It Is: 11/3/08

What I’m reading: The Spy in the Ointment, by Donald Westlake. I checked this book out of my local library around 25 years ago, and I decided to go back and check to see if it’s still there. After they computerized the system, they threw out the old sign-out cards, so there’s no sign of when I actually took this one out. But I think I was around 11 or 12 years old. It’s a hoot of a caper novel, so I’ll probably return to some of those Dortmunder novels that I was too young to understand.

What I’m listening to: Mind How You Go, by Skye.

What I’m watching: Not much. Watched the third episode of Mad Men (season 1), and am still sorta eh about it. I guess the aspect I find the most interesting is the way the female characters are all portrayed as stunted, crippled personae. But maybe I’m more fascinated by the way that, at certain angles, Jon Hamm resembles Steve Carrell with a much smaller nose.

What I’m drinking: I’m out of Plymouth gin, so it’s back to Wet by Beefeater.

What Rufus is up to: Having his Saturday night bath and smelling nice and fresh. Oh, and playing with his new hedgehog toy, which I’ve alternately named Hedge Fun and Hedgie Murat.

Where I’m going: Atlanta in a couple of weeks, but nowhere this week.

What I’m happy about: Getting out to the Giants game on Sunday!

What I’m sad about: The realization that I’m likely never going to see my copies of Grant Morrison’s Bible John comic, having lent them to Chip Delany a number of years ago.

What I’m pondering: Lydia Hearst: Hot or not? Broken reflection of Heather Graham or not?

Me and e

Virginia Heffernan has a nice piece in the NYT Magazine about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. The biggest complaints I hear about the Kindle from tech geeks is that it needs to have an color touchscreen with a high-powered browser, cellphone service and maybe a camera. Which is to say, they miss the point. It’s an e-reader, not an e-everything. I agree with them, of course, when they say it’s a butt-ugly piece of design.

Ms. Heffernan does a good job of explaining how the Kindle’s “limitations” are what define it as a great device for . . . reading books. Which I do a lot of.

In short, you get absorbed when reading on the Kindle. You lose hours to reading novels in one sitting. You sit up straighter, energized by new ideas and new universes. You nod off, periodically, infatuated or entranced or spent. And yet the slight connection to the Web still permits the (false, probably, but nonetheless reassuring) sense that if the apocalypse came while you were shut away somewhere reading, the machine would get the news from Amazon.com and find a way to let you know. Anything short of that, though, the Kindle leaves you alone.

And alone is where I want to be, for now. It’s bliss. Emerge from the subway or alight from a flight, and the Kindle has no news for you. No missed calls. It’s ready only to be read. It’s like a good exercise machine that mysteriously incentivizes the pursuit of muscle pain while still making you feel cared for. The Kindle makes you want to read, and read hard, and read prolifically. It eventually makes me aware that, compared with reading a lush, inky book, checking e-mail is boring, workaday and lame.

The only thing she doesn’t touch upon is what I consider the Kindle’s game-changing aspect: the ability to download free samples of e-books rather than having to buy the whole thing. There are a number of books that I’ve decided not to buy after checking out their first 30 or so pages on the Kindle. In some cases, I decided I simply didn’t like the book enough to buy it; in others, I’ve passed because the formatting of that particular book hasn’t looked good on the device, or because a translation isn’t the one I wanted (Amazon’s Kindle store is a little hinky when it comes to books in translation).

Give it a read.

F*** You, You Whining F***: 10/25/08

I suppose a disproportionate number of these F*** You posts are going to come from the literary world. I just have a great deal of pissed-off with regards to people who think book publishing could be a utopian wonderworld if publishers would just stop caring about making money. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of money gets wasted and big publishers are hemmed in by a blockbuster mentality, but that said . . . well, let’s just leave it to the David Ulin, book editor at the L.A. Times:

What’s more likely [than mid-list authors getting low-balled in favor of hype-driven Big Deals], I think, is that publishers will scale back some of their higher-end advances, especially in regard to certain risky properties: books blown out of magazine stories, over-hyped first novels, multi-platform “synergies.” At least, I hope that’s what happens, because one of the worst trends in publishing — in culture in general — over the last decade or so has been its air of desperate frenzy, which far more than falling numbers tells you that an industry is in decline.

That is, faced with hard times and a declining global economy, book publishers are going to abandon their quick-hit strategy, and start promoting “serious” literary midlist authors whose books could take decades to catch on (if they ever do). Oh, and they won’t do this because it would make any sense to their management and ownership per se, but because that’s what I want to happen.

And this will work why? Oh, because our global economic tumult will make us all crave “serious” literature!

This, of course, may be the silver lining to our current economic contraction: No more will publishers or writers have time or money for ephemera. During the Great Depression, even popular literature got serious: The 1930s saw the birth of noir. As the money dries up, so too, one hopes, does the gadabout nature of literary culture, the breathless gossip, all the endless hue and cry.

I just hope they don’t let him review business and finance books.

Bonus: the writer refers to the “ridiculous (and ongoing) print-versus-Web non-controversy” despite the fact that he works at a newspaper that’s collapsing . . . because all of its readers have left for the Web!

There’s nothing wrong with you that I can’t fix. With my stats.

Possibly the greatest basketball-to-comics non sequitur ever, courtesy of ESPN’s NBA preview article on Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey:

Morey grew up reading Bill James’ Baseball Abstract and later worked for the stats guru, but his geekier tendencies might actually have more to do with his boyhood love of comic book anti-heroes who cut against the grain, figures like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. “In a league in which 30 teams are competing for one prize, you have to differentiate yourself somehow,” Morey says. “We chose analytics.”

What’s great is that this article is all about using calm, cool reasoning and “analytics” to explain the decision to trade for Ron Artest!

Bonus: Did I mention that the annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview will be posted on Tuesday morning, just in time for the debut of the 2008-2009 season? I just did!

Caption Contest!

I was bored at lunch today, and flipped through the funny pages of the local crappy paper. Not only did I discover that “Love is . . .” is an ongoing comic strip/panel, I also discovered that it’s gotten pretty risque!

So, I offer up a new Caption Contest! Submit your entries in the Comments section below!

I’ll kick things off with, “Love is . . . realizing you’re the only girl at a swingers’ party.”

What It Is: 10/13/08

What I’m reading: Samaritan, by Richard Price. Because I miss The Wire.

What I’m listening to: Body of Song by Bob Mould and Angel Milk by Telepopmusik.

What I’m watching: 30 Rock, season 1, LSU/Florida (ugh), and a bunch of close NFL games.

What I’m drinking: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I’m still on my one-drink-a-week routine, weirdly enough. Which means I haven’t had a G&T in more than 2 weeks.

What Rufus is up to: Attempted rape at the paws of a savoy down at the local farmers’ market on Saturday. Oh, the shame! He also got to take a short hike to Ramapo Lake, and stopped in at the Garden State Barkway to get his nails clipped, so on balance it was an okay weekend for him.

Where I’m going: Nowhere this week. I really oughtta get into NYC sometime.

What I’m happy about: My mom’s busted wrist healed well enough for her to go on her hiking trip to Utah this week. And that official VM pal Paul Di Filippo had his new book launch with comics legend Jim Woodring out in Seattle!

What I’m sad about: Only three weeks left in the presidential campaign! No!

What I’m pondering: Why this exists.