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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.

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Unrequired Reading

I’ve decided to make Unrequired Reading a regular post on Friday mornings. It’ll consist of the same stuff I was posting at random in the past few weeks. Which is to say, thanks to the miracle of RSS feeds, VM goofs around online so you don’t have to.

As my friend Mitch put it, “You know you’ve bottomed out when Bobby Brown says you’re an unfit mother to his children.”

(It’s Mother’s Day, not All Everybody Day!)

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Here’s a slideshow about Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple.

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10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments

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You stay classy, Cleveland.

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You are your Netflix Queue.

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Visiting Kandor?

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Firing tons of people — even Japanese people — does not automatically make you a success. I can’t stress this enough. Restructuring by “cutting fat” is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily put a company in the position to succeed in the future. Carlos Ghosn is trying to stay ahead of the game by allying with an American automaker and firing a ton of people.

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A wide-ranging (by my lights) interview with U of Penn Architecture Department Chair Detlef Mertins, author of a book on Mies van der Rohe.

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Paul Wolfowitz is running into trouble as president of the World Bank, due to his policy of not lending money to corrupt regimes.

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Will on Wal

George Will on the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Wal-Mart:

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

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This week in Unrequired Reading

Stories that have been sitting in my RSS feed this week:

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine muses on the 40th anniversary of Star Trek:

And finally, [Star Trek is] a story of a powerful belief in what the franchise represents: the right of individuals, through machinery, weaponry, or barehanded intelligence, to live, be free, and pursue happiness, no matter how horrific the results (and we can all agree that Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was as slow and agonizing as any torture devised on that evil Enterprise from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode in which Spock has a beard). Put all these ingredients together and it’s clear: Star Trek is the story of America.

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Mary Worth and Nothingness

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Tom Spurgeon interviews Sammy Harkham, the only “young” cartoonist whose work I’ve started to follow. I have an unfinished post from earlier this summer, about the MoCCA comics festival in NYC. The post was all about my realization that I’ve become a boring old fart, because I couldn’t think of any cartoonists whose work I discovered in the last five to eight years. Fortunately, I picked up one of Sammy’s comics then, and found a small book of his a few weeks later that impressed me.

Sammy edits an anthology called Kramer’s Ergot, and the interview discusses the process of putting the most recent edition together. As ever, I find this stuff fascinating, but you may not.

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George Will reviews a 9/11 novel that doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but that’s because the 9/11 novel I published tanked:

Messud’s Manhattan story revolves around two women and a gay man who met as classmates at Brown University and who, as they turn 30 in 2001, vaguely yearn to do something “important” and “serious.” Vagueness — lack of definition — is their defining characteristic. Which may be because — or perhaps why — all three are in the media. All are earnest auditors and aspiring improvers of the nation’s sensibility.

Uh, yeah.

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BLDGBLOG interviews author Jeff VanderMeer about the intersection of architecture and the novel.

As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating “reality” but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I’m creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don’t just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers — and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that — a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place — even if, say, they’re holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] — they just don’t get it.

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Times UK restaurant reviewer Giles Coren visited Croatia for a column:

The language is called Croatian these days, except in Serbia, where it is called Serbian, and it hasn’t got any easier. Chapter two of my Teach Yourself Croatian book was about counting to ten, and gently explained as follows: “The number one behaves like an adjective and its ending changes according to the word which follows. The number two has different forms when it refers to masculine and neuter nouns than when it refers to feminine nouns, and is followed always by words in the genitive singular, as are the words for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The numbers 5-20, however, are followed by words in the genitive plural. . .”

This is why you never see Croatians in groups of more than one or less than five in a bar. Because it isn’t actually possible to order the right number of beers.

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Official VM buddy Jecca reviews the second issue of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint (which, as I type it, sounds like something she came up with while she was in the joint, a la that Prison Break show).

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Gorgeous pictures of the world’s greatest libraries. There’s a book about it.

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What’s an interweb?

Big off-site sales meeting today, to discuss online sales strategies for the company. I’m not in sales, but they brought me in (along with our VP/editorial director) to give some perspective on how the editors can contribute good web-based content.

It was a critical meeting, in which we hammered out much of the plans for how we’re going to move this publishing company into the 21st century. People gave presentations on our digitial editions, webinars, and push e-mail systems, while discussing how to integrate online and print advertising packages. Thanks to the strategies we developed today, our salespeople are ready to go out and increase our online revenue fivefold in 2007.

Except maybe this guy:

Besides this moment, my favorite part of the meeting was when the sales consultant asked us, “How many of you go to YouTube.com?”

I raised my hand, as did our IT guy and our e-mail manager. That was it. I blurted out, “What the heck do you people do online all day?!”

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This is Your Hometown

I live in my hometown. I’ve been here for about 25 of my 35 years, even though I moved away when I was 17. Most of my neighbors are my parents’ age, which makes for a quiet street. Except for those punk kids who live down the hill, but that’s another story.

I refute the Grosse Point Blank mindset pretty well. Even though I was a hyperliterate misfit in my formative years (as opposed to, y’know, now), I have a fondness for this place, with the Revolutionary War manor houses, the gorgeous gardens, the fantastic pizza, the strange shadow race of orange people who live on the edge of town (that’s a story for another post).

Tonight, I was confronted with the one aspect of living in one’s hometown that I’ve avoided for years: bumping into an old schoolmate.

Now, I’ve seen some of them over the years, but never gotten into a conversation. The last time was in 1997, when I walked into the local barbershop (The Shear Shop). I was going out for a job interview the next day (at the office where I now work), looked like the Unabomer’s little brother, and needed to clean up. The stylist at the counter took one look at me and said, “Gil?”

I replied, “Ericka?” It was she. We talked while she cut my hair, reminiscing over our barely shared high school experiences. But that encounter was almost a decade ago. I’ve bumped into almost no one since.

It’s not that I’m averse to talking to people from my youth; I have plenty of friends from that stage of my life. I’m just averse to getting into conversations in supermarkets or convenience stores, which is where these little recognitions take place. I’m usually pretty tired by the end of the day, and I tend to have many excuses in my arsenal to keep from talking to people.

But There I Was, standing on the deli line at the supermarket, while Amy was getting some other fixings for dinner. The guy working behind the counter looked a lot like someone I met in kindergarten or thereabouts, and his nametag pretty much sealed the deal.

But did I say anything? Oh, no. I figured it was fine just recognizing the guy. There was no need to actually start talking to him. I could just tell Amy that I saw a guy from grade school at the deli counter.

He turned to take my order, paused a second, and said, “Gil Roth?”

“Rick Bolt?”

“Wow! I thought it was you! How you doing?”

“Living in Ringwood,” I told him. “You too, huh?”

“Been around a lot, but I ended up back here,” he said.

“Not a bad place to be,” I said. I introduced Amy to him, and he mentioned that his wife had just stopped by to see him.

Fortunately, he avoided the awkward, “So what are you doing?” question, which would’ve been fine in theory but would’ve contrasted with his, “I’m working behind the deli counter, cutting a half-pound of cheddar for you” response.

But I don’t want to address any class-oriented issues in this post. No, I’m more concerned with a very basic question:

How the heck did someone who hasn’t seen me since 1989 identify me at a goddamn glance?!

Seriously! You’ve seen what I looked like around then! (masochistally speaking, I love breaking out this picture)

I’m 40-50 lbs. heavier, I don’t wear glasses, and my hair is a bunch shorter. Moreover, it’s been almost 20 years! I mean godDAMN!

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Written in flesh

You may or may not know that I have a 9/11 tattoo on my right arm. I got it the Sunday after the attacks. It’s not particularly exciting, as tattoos go. In fact, my artist was a little bummed that I wanted a dull, blocky font, rather than the flourishing cursive he was planning to use.

A few months ago, an acquaintance of mine (Eric Solstein) discovered that an acquaintance of his (Jonathan Hyman) has been photographing 9/11 memorials: tattoos, graffiti and other personal tributes. Eric hooked us up, and a few photos of my tattoo are now among the 15,000+ pics that Jon has taken.

Before the shoot, Jon showed me a bunch of shots from the collection, and they’re pretty breathtaking. He filled me in on the stories of how many gallery shows or museum exhibits he was going to have, and how often the rug was pulled out from under him. While the portfolio was amazing, I admit that my BS-meter was pinging a bit (but I was glad to be part of the collective memory).

Fortunately, I was utterly wrong. “9/11 and the American Landscape: Photographs by Jonathan Hyman” will be open from Friday, Sept. 8 to Saturday, Oct. 7, at WTC #7, 250 Greenwich St., 45th flr. The event is curated by Clifford Chanin and is accompanied by a color catalogue featuring an introduction by Pete Hamill, according to Jon.

I doubt that my photo is among the 63 that are on display in this exhibit, but Amy & I will head in Saturday for the opening reception. The venue (that rebuilt WTC #7) overlooks the WTC site (or the Memorial Hole, as The Onion put it); I’ll try to post some photos from the event, especially for you out-of-towners who wonder what things look like nowadays.