Posted on

What It Is: 4/27/09

What I’m reading: Plutarch’s Lives (Numa Pompilius, Solon, Poplicola and about half of Themistocles), Push Man and Other Stories, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Clyde Fans, Bk. 1, by Seth. Oh, and that new ish of Fantastic Man.

What I’m listening to: Not a lot. I watched The Wire on my Pod during both flights last week, and my two days back in the office were so hectic that I didn’t put any music on.

What I’m watching: The first season of The Wire again, Slumdog Millionaire, which must be Danny Boyle’s most sentimental movie, and Behavioral Problems the new Ron White standup show.

What I’m drinking: I had 2 beers in Vegas, and 1 G&T since returning.

What Rufus is up to: Not being happy with the sudden near-90 temps that we got this weekend. And giving free rides to the ticks of NJ.

Where I’m going: Nowhere this week, but I’ll probably take a day off and do all sorts of errands.

What I’m happy about: I went to a minor-league baseball game on my last night in Vegas, and had a fun time (pix and story to follow). And I’ll get to meet both Tatsumi and Seth (I hope) during my Toronto visit in two weeks.

What I’m sad about: Bea Arthur’s death, I guess. (Thanks, Tom!) UPDATE: a great tribute to Bea from the Fugly Girls!

What I’m worried about: Global pandemic.

What I’m pondering: How you tell if the raider is cheating.

Posted on

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!)

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.