Stuck in the Middle Fittingly for a band that pissed away so much of its potential, the Replacements still haven't really gotten the posthumous treatment they deserve. Rhino will be reissuing all the 'Mats albums, the Twin/Tone era is already out and getting good reviews. Rhino generally does a good job with this sort of thing and it'll certainly be better than All for Nothing/Nothing for All the greatest hits/B-side collection that was limited to only the major label years.
Still, a slew of reissues, featuring some bonus tracks looks more like a money gouge for those of us who already have the original and some boots. I can't buy a CD for one song. I just don't work that way. Sooner or later they'll get a boxed set. Every moron with more than six albums gets a boxed set eventually, are you telling me the 'Mats won't?
I recently finished The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, An Oral History by Minneapolis rocker and writer Jim Walsh. Good enough, I'd even say it's must ... for the fans. A really great history of the Replacements would probably be interesting even to people who didn't like indie music. The youth - Tommy Stinson really was 14 when they started - the booze, the expectations, pissing away those expectations, playing the greatest rock songs ever written, playing so poorly you get things thrown at you. All Over But the Shouting captures some of it, but it's not the history they deserve.
Apparently the story about the 'Mats sneaking back into Twin/Tone to toss their master tapes into the river is true. Manager Peter Jeperson had made other copies, making the reissues possible. Smart guy.
How Did I Not Know About Moe Berg? Tooling around Barnes & Noble before seeing "The Forbidden Kingdom" this past weekend, I read the first few pages of The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. Berg was a back-up catcher for the Red Sox in the late 30s, then a coach for a couple years, and (as you may have guessed) eventually a spy working for the OSS during WW2. One of his assignments was to attend a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, determine if the Germans were close to developing an A-Bomb, and shoot him if they were. Fascinating stuff. [Moe Berg Wikipedia page]
Lucius in Stride Lucius Shepard's Hugo Nominated short story, "Stars Seen Through Stone." The intrusion of other realities into troubled relationships is Shepard's meat and potatoes. I like this as a relatively upbeat alternate version of his recent short novel, "Softspoken."
Arthur C. Clarke dies. And so the last of the triumvirate of early sci-fi giants, along with Heinlein and Asimov, is gone. Phil Dick once said that every time someone used a robot that thought it was human he should get paid. For Clarke, it's every time a giant spaceship hovers over a city and people gather together to look up in awe and fear. Childhood's End is a legitimate classic. The stories stay with me more. "The Star" and "Nine Billion Names of God" are perfect, mind-blowing constructions. R.I.P.
Bookstore Fun If you ever want to the see the extent of the right wing publishing noise machine, well, why the hell would you? It's much more fun to kill your brain cells with alcohol. But if you must check out the extent of the "Hate the Left" type books, go to one of those remainder and overstock stores. I was in one today and was struck by the sheer number of unwanted screeds. Unsurprisingly, many lonely Ann Coulter books haunted the shelves along with Trent Lott's memoirs. What a cute couple.
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: How the Left is Blah, blah, blah I passed by. I almost picked up Intellectual Morons: Why the Left believes Blahbity Blah just to see if it had a real publisher or came from one of those phony conservative clearinghouses. Many of these books are published just to be bought in bulk to make the author a name and then they have to go somewhere. I think they should insulate houses with them. I mean, no one appears to want these books.
Liberals Hate Us was the reoccurring theme and gibberish predominated. They couldn't even name a powerful figure. It was "liberals" or "the left." Way to have some facts. I know left wing books also get remaindered, but I didn't come across any on this trip. The closest I could come was Mo Rocca's All the Presidents Pets, which didn't seem as political or angry.
Knows When to Hold 'EmJames McManus on Barack Obama's poker history. Obama took up the game in the Illinois legislature apparently as a way to make connections. This is the third time or so I've heard he's a decent player, which makes me more inclined to vote for him. (I plan to drop this info at my next home game, which has members that lean too far rightward. That Obama's poker playing may switch votes says a lot about the fanaticism my group has for poker or the utter lack of enthusiasm many republicans have for their field.) McManus wrote Positively Fifth Street, about covering and playing in the 2000 World Series of Poker and the Binion murder trial. It's a decent book and he's supposedly at work on a book about the history of poker, which might be even better since the parts of Fifth Street that I didn't like were mostly autobiographical. (Link via Ghost in the Machine, which has become a nice clearinghouse for all things Obama.)
6) The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright - This is a reissued, nearly lost gem of a juvenile novel, first published in 1941. The four Melendy kids decide to pool their allowances so once a week one of them can have a forty cent adventure instead of each of them trying to have a ten cent adventure. As history, the book is fascinating. A six year old walking alone around New York City to get to the circus! There's something beautiful about Enright's vision of childhold here that probably makes The Saturdays more appealling to grownups than actual kids. (My seven year old read this but only once and didn't seem to like it as much as me and Mrs. BoneDaddy.) She romanticizes siblings and long afternoons with little to do, out of the way playrooms and "what I want to be" dreams. Adults probably like that stuff more than kids.
5) Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane (1998) - I've had this book forever. Fear of spoilers surrounding the movie convinced me to finally pick it up. Lehane doesn't do anything great, but he does a lot of things well. His dialogue is good, but I didn't put this away with my Elmore Leonard or anything. The sense of place is strong, if one note - this is not a Boston novel, it's a south Boston novel. And the plot ... well, if you've seen the movie you know the plot. The resolution is sad, mostly earned and admirably unflinching. I did tear through this in a day, so it also works as a good, but not really great thriller.
4) The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta (2007) - For me it was a better year in non-fiction (with two giant exceptions coming), since I have to start talking about Perrotta's latest by saying it's not as good as either Election or Little Children. Ruth Ramsey accidentally tells the truth while teaching high school sex ed (oral sex - "some people enjoy it") and the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth begins a crusade against the school, sex ed and Ruth. They insert in the classroom a Tracy Flick-ish co-teacher, who is the only part of The Abstinence Teacher to be truly satirical. Perrotta writes with a lot of sympathy for Tim - former addict, Tabernacle member, soccer coach for Ruth's daughter and other half of the novel's focus. I suspect this novel signals Perrotta stepping away from satire towards a contemporary Updike area. He is a master of suburban unhappiness - which is rarer than it sounds - but also great at comedy. A slightly unsatisfying finish keeps this from finishing higher on my list.
3) The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead (2000) - Imagine if the elevator were more important than the car and the computer. If Otis were better known than Ford and Edison. Then imagine the power a corrupt union of elevator inspectors could have over a city, if that city existed in some kind of Brazil-ian (the movie, not the country) non-time, non-place. That's odd enough. But what if a new way of inspecting elevators split the union into the traditionalists and the intuitionists, who can feel what an elevator will do? If one side wanted to discredit the other side, they could frame Lila Mae, the first black female elevator inspector and an Intuitionist to boot, right? (Racism, by the way, is rampant. And it's a sign of the maturity of Whitehead's vision that Lila is the second black elevator inspector and the first one hates her because he feels he paid all the dues for her and she's stirring up the trouble that had settled down.) Odd, dense and certainly not for everyone, but I liked it.
2) Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972) - Now we get to the reccomendations without reservations. There's a long list of movies I won't see because I loved the book. The list of books I wouldn't read because I loved the movie too much was one book long. Watership Down, the movie, probably isn't nearly as good as I remember it. When I was nine, this movie had more of an impact on me than Star Wars, not that I'd have ever admitted it.
So I refused to read the book for a few decades. I'm funny that way. To my surprise - I have read other Richard Adams books - Watership Down is a masterpiece. The heft of the book always made me think it was crammed full of naturalistic garbage and meandering nature writing in British and/or rabbit slang, but the book is terrifically paced. Ultimately it's as much an adventure novel as an allegory with the nature writing complementing the story.
Watership Down is filled with chill scenes, and I don't think it's entirely because certain quotes ("There's a dog loose in the woods...""Can you run, rabbit?") are indelibly marked on my brain. Bigwig in the tunnel was utterly gripping and people, we're talking about rabbits here.
1)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (2007) - My No Duh choice. The publishing event of the year was also the book of the year. Some of the nitpickers make some good points about the book. I have complaints here and there about other Potter books, but I'm also upping the degree of difficulty here. Rowling had to finish an epic story, tie up a bunch of loose ends, give many characters their due and tell a self-containted story for children and adults, all under a spotlight brighter than has ever been put on an author and Deathly Hallows got it done.
For me, the hype built up the experience. Because I partially experienced it all through the eyes of a seven year old I was reminded that story-telling is often a social activity. Round the campfire, in front of the TV, whatever. Stories and masses aren't enemies. The articles, the book discussions and yes, even the balloons in the Stop-n-Shop added to the fun but only because the book delivered. (Also helped that I managed to finish the book without encountering spoilers - even from my own house.) Harry walking through the woods surrounded by ghosts (you know what I'm talking about if you've read the book) is the quintessential moment of the series and it happens at the end. You don't get that often. And you get a fantasy like this probably once in a generation.
My honorable mention for 2007 goes to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), not on the list because I'd read it before. It really holds up. I read it in preperation for the movie, then never saw the movie. Based on the reviews, I think I got a better experience. Dan Harrington's Harrington on Hold 'Embooks also almost made it onto my non-fiction list, but I figured that's kinda niche.
Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.
4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.
3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.
2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.
"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"
1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.
Dropkick Murphys - "The Meanest of Times": I can't imagine any Battle of the Bands format the Murphys wouldn't win ... and I'm not only imagining formats where the band members have to do shots of whiskey chased with Guinness between songs, where success is measured by the vivacity of the mosh pit, where the bands play in front of a soused crowd of laborers in the sweaty basement of a union hall, etc...
Tim Armstrong - "A Poet's Life" : I don't know if Armstrong is more than thirty years old but, even if not, he might want to take Mencken's quip to heart. As much as I like this album, the title makes me cringe. Once you get past his "I'm a poet and a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-rolling party man" posing, there's no denying the wickedly danceable ska-inflected groovealiciousness.
Books (Read for the First Time Regardless of Year Published)
A more macho list of manly-men movies would be hard to imagine. I'm really not trying to exclude female filmmakers (nor authors, nor musicians) ... but, wow, take the Y chromosone out and you're not left with much here. Although, I actually thought China Mieville was a woman until I saw his picture in the back of "Perdido Street Station".
Heinlein's Star Fading? I keep rereading Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and some of the "juveniles" (Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy & Podkayne of Mars) every year or two and I still think he's miles better than Asimov or Clarke. Still, I haven't even thought of going back to Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (any of the Lazarus Long novels, actually) and -- long separated from the wild libertarian to fascist swings of my teenage years -- I don't have much stomach for his "hairy-chested" prose, as this LA Times piece dubs it. (Nice synchronicity, btw, with Mark over at Cheek nominating R.A.H. for membership in the Manly Writers Corps.)
Also in the LA Times is a list of fave sci-fi novels of 2007 that'll make it's way to my library hold list.
Update: Heinlein's (manly) optimism in an essay on thisibelieve.org -- he's popping up everywhere these days as his Centenary year winds down.
They Eat Their Own Regnery, for those who don't know, is a conservative book publisher. I use the term "publisher" loosely. Essentially it's a propaganda mill, churning out swift-boat type books that are too kooky to be published by Harper-Collins. See, Rupert Murdoch's Harper-Collins wants to churn out right-wing garbage, but it also wants to make money. Regnery is a private welfare system for liars. The various arms of Richard Mellon Sciafe's empire buy up Regnery books in bulk to land them on the New York Times bestseller list, which then gets the authors on TV and radio and convinces some in the public that the books are actually books. Regnery is the reason the Times started using a symbol to denote bulk-purchased "bestsellers."
Now these authors - remember they're conservatives so they've been trained to drink the Kool-Aid - start to believe they're actually best selling authors and wonder how come they haven't made much money. After failing in the free market, these free market conservatives do what you'd expect lawsuit-hating conservatives to do. Sue. This would make a great Pinter play.
"I'm a bestselling author!"
"You're called a bestselling author because it's a good thing to be called, not because your books have sold best."
"But my books have sold!"
"Only because we're the ones who bought them."
"So pay me!"
"We didn't really pay full price ... What was that book about?"
"How welfare creates dependency and an entitlement mentality. Give me my money!"
Mrs. BoneDaddy had already seen these by the time I passed it along to her, but some of you might enjoy this photo collection of the World's Most Beautiful Libraries. A little too European and cathedral-ly for my tastes - I figured Yale's Beinecke was a lock - but some undeniably beautiful rooms in there.
12 Memorable newspaper comic strip deaths. They're only sort of ranked, but I would have given the top two spots to Doonesbury, one for Dick Davenport (dead of a heart attack while bird-watching) who is mentioned and for Andy (comic strip's first gay character, died from AIDS while listening to just-released Pet Sounds on CD).
Bands inspired by the Harry Potter books are probably busy right now. I actually have a couple of songs in iTunes by Harry and the Potters, but nothing by Draco and the Malfoys. Any girl group looking to form should grab the name The Weird Sisters before it's taken.
I've finally gotten around to reading H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, partially because I loved the show and partially because I was kind of sick of reading on the back of every book that follows something for a year "It's the Friday Night Lights of chess/scrabble/day trading/porn." Just like they always say about the show, it's so much more than football. The portrait of the boom and bust town of Odessa, Texas which has no constant except a love of Mojo Panther football is mesmerizing. It's also very much about race. Bissinger does not flinch or cover up for this town that finally integrated its schools in 1982. And when they had to, they grabbed as many blacks as they could (sending the Hispanics elsewhere) because, you know, who do you want as a running back, a black or a Hispanic? The chapter on the use of the word "nigger" in Odessa is pretty much essential reading on race in America. (It's like household cleaner, you can use it anywhere.)
I've never seen the movie and I have to believe it - like the show - kind of whitewashes some of Bissinger's book. I root for the Panthers on the show. The kids and the town in this book is frequently so ugly, conservative, racist and vain I often felt that losing would be good for them. Then you realize that the other team is often just as ugly and maybe nobody should win or maybe nobody should pour too much into this game.
The chapter on the Midland-Odessa rivalry becomes fascinating in light of the failed W administration. W grew up in Midland and wrecked his first businesses there. Friday Night Lights was published in 1990 and doesn't mention W at all - Bush the Greater gets a few pages - but the descriptions of Midland business culture are appalling when you consider this was W's environment.
"Greed, delusional visions of grandeur, the mercenary mercilessness that made every relationship expendable - Midland perfected all these long before they became the standard of the eighties around the rest of the country."
"Over at the country club, or in enormous corner offices with picture windows that seemed to deserve something more than wide-angle views of scrub brush and mesquite, [Midland oil executives] confused luck with business acumen. Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe they were the creators of it."
This is so much more than football. It's the Friday Night Lights of football.
I happen to be re-reading Cat's Cradle, for obvious reasons. A lot of it is coming back to me and I'm enjoying it, probably not as much as when I was nineteen, but still. Certain books should be read by young people and certain books, say Moby Dick, are probably best enjoyed when you're older. I'm coming across a lot of great quotes - even better than his "15 Best", such as:
"The highest possible form of treason," said Minton, "is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do."
About 3-4 years ago, I suffered two weeks of Berenstain Bears overload. I'll never forget it. See, I hate the Berenstain Bears. Everything that's wrong with children's books is in these particular books. Sloppy illustrations, poor writing, boring stories, platitudes. The gender stereotypes are beyond belief and yet every bear is basically the same bear with different outfits. Sister Bear is Brother Bear with a pink jumper and a bow. Father Bear is a big Brother Bear in overalls and Mother Bear is a dumpier Father Bear in an ugly house dress and hairnet(?). These bears have so little personality (beyond the gender stereotypes) they actually have no names. Brother Bear is called "Brother Bear" by his own father and by people outside his own family. I can't tell you how angry this makes me.
I had a rule with my kids. They could take one Berenstain Bears book out of the library at a time (with all the other, unregulated books). They figured out how much these books bugged me so they pulled their one Berenstain book off the shelf and read it far more than they probably really wanted to. It was the equivalent of pulling a Band-Aid off slowly so eventually I just let them take as many as they wanted out of the library. Two weeks and they were sick of the Berenstain Bears. Not an easy two weeks, but just two weeks.
I bring this up because a few months ago, my older daughter got into the Babysitters Club books and I went straight for the rip the Band-Aid off approach. The babysitters are a bunch of middle school girls who, like the Berenstain Bears, are kind of the same with different things stuck to them. They're all know-it-all butinskys, but this one is shy, that one bossy, that one "artsy." But they all learn an appropriate lesson by the end of the book and they're all boy crazy. (I checked the books out first. There was nothing inappropriate, just a lot of "cute boys" and descriptions of the dumb ass clothes these girls wear.) So I went straight for the "You want to try a cigarette, huh?" approach.
Do you know how many Babysitters books there are? The main series has about 120 books, plus the 20 mystery books and the 20 "super specials." So over the past three months or so my daughter has read somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 pages of Babysitters books, not counting the ones she re-read, before coughing on the noxious fumes and refusing to dive into the "Little Sister" spin-offs. That's a lot of crushes, "but I'm your best friend"s, baby-sitters one-upping the parents, leggings and lessons. You know the theory that the act of studying is more important than the material studied? Let's hope it's true. (I can't disrespect my daughter's reading taste in general. Harry Potter remained her one true love through it all and she's read so much more widely than I ever would have expected, but man, these books are crap.)
KSR's Next Stan reveals in a Locus interview that he's working on another historical novel ...
I've sold a book about the birth of science called The Galileans. It will have a science fiction element, but a strongly historical narrative as well. I researched the subject when I was writing The Years of Rice and Salt, which includes an alternative scientific revolution. Having done that, I thought, 'Well, what actually happened is fascinating.' So this new book is constellated about the figure of Galileo. Because he was famously put on trial by the Pope, he's still a good way to discuss the relationship between science and religion, and how those two can be reconciled (or not).
He also recommends a historical novelist I've never heard of: Cecelia Holland. If he thinks she's one of our greatest novelists, I'm intrigued.
I can only comment on the ones I've read, pardon the formatting:
Historian, The Kostova, Elizabeth Little, Brown 2005 [I can't believe this. I almost didn't finish this book, it was so bad. Two word review: pedestrian, bloodless.]
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Haddon, Mark Random House 2004 [Worthy.]
Da Vinci Code, The Brown, Dan Transworld 2003 [A good read, but one of the 100?]
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Rowling, J.K. Bloomsbury 1997 [I'm OK with this.]
High Fidelity Hornby, Nick Penguin 1995 [OK]
Suitable Boy, A Seth,Vikram Orion 1994 [Yes. I wouldn't have bothered linking the list if this hadn't been on it.]
Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow Hoeg, Peter HarperCollins 1992 [Yeah, so I'm noticing that lots of the ones I read were made into movies. Great book, good movie.]
English Patient Ondaatje, Michael Macmillan 1992 [I'm thinking of Elaine at the movie theater, unable to bear the overwrought drama. I actually liked both the book and the movie, but I get the attitude.]
LA Confidential Ellroy, James Random House 1990 [Ellroy was on one of those shows on the Biography Channel, or Court TV, one of those things, talking about his mother's murder, his investigation of it, etc. It was kind of creepy how he talked about is feelings about his mother and how he's written about it. Very odd character, that one. Great novel though.]
Remains Of The Day Ishiguro, Kazuo Faber 1989 [I stand by this.]
Bonfire Of The Vanities, The Wolfe, Tom Macmillan 1987 [I wouldn't have included this one.]
Watchmen Moore, Alan Titan 1987 [Yeah.]
Perfume Suskind, Patrick Penguin 1985 [Definitely.]
Handmaid's Tale Atwood, Margaret Random House 1985 [OK]
Love In The Time Of Cholera Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Penguin 1985 [Absolutely.]
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Kundera, Milan Faber 1984 [Yep.]
Neuromancer Gibson, William HarperCollins 1984 [Zzzzzzz. So many better sci-fi novels to choose from. I guess this is where I'll rant about how there is not a single KSR book on this list. Idiots. This over "The Years of Rice and Salt"?!?!? Over the "The Gold Coast"?! Ugh.]
Money Amis, Martin Random House 1984 [Yep.]
Name of the Rose, The Eco, Umberto Random House 1983 [Ironically, or not, I just finished Krugman's "The Great Unraveling" and was looking for a book I haven't read in a while to reread and "The Name of the Rose" wound up getting pulled off the shelf.]
I'm a little discouraged by the 19% read rate. More discouraged that the literati apparently think so little of Stan Robinson's novels. I mean, fine, if you were put off by the science and pacing of the Mars books, I don't get it, but lots of people were so, I can see how those could be overlooked. But they slogged through Gibson's overrated prose and liked that better? Better than a half-dozen or so of Stan's books that were better than at least half the 19 listed above? I just don't get it.
Sooner or later, I'm going to read Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point so I can make sense of things like Don Imus' firing. Don't get me wrong, publically calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" is reprehensible - and this is coming from a UConn fan who thought he would never stand up for Rutgers about anything. Still, he has said equally nasty things for years about women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals and more without a suspension, never mind a firing. Colin McEnroe has an interesting post about this (written days ago) pointing out that it's not about Imus, it's about the McCains and Rudys and Liebermans who go on his show. Is this why Imus is finally in trouble, not because of the comments, which frankly would barely qualify as a warm-up for Howard Stern, but because of the company he has to keep?
Or is this because of Nipplegate? Bear in mind that less than a week after the Columbine killings Howard Stern noted how attractive some of the fleeing high school girls were and wondered why the killers passed up the opportunity to rape some of them. He did this on the air and kept his show. Surely that's worse.
I just go back to the idea of the tipping point. Some formula with unknowable variables puts Imus in the trouble he should have been in years ago while Stern hasn't hit his. It always amazes me that Cheney and Bush can go on Rush Limbaugh's show and no one points out what a hate-filled creep they're associating with. He hasn't reached his tipping point. (When drug-boy does, it'll be a doozy.) Somehow the reaction to Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot was far stronger than the reactions to her past vile comments. It's like they haven't really gotten away with this stuff, they just haven't been held accountable yet.
A brief article on the rise of Philip K. Dick's reputation since his death. I got into written science fiction by way of Blade Runner and its source Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? so the guy has always been a giant to me.
Daniel Radcliffe will star in the final two Harry Potter movies. That's easily a good choice. Better to go forward with the guy who, even though he now looks too old for the part, has done a decent job of it than to introduce someone completely different to end it. Radcliffe is only two or three years older than Harry, which is nothing in crazy Hollywood casting, but he looks much older. (Check out how young the main three look in the article's photo!) In the past couple of books, Rowling has dropped lines about how tall Harry is getting. If Kareem-abdul-Weasley isn't a problem, a studded out Harry really isn't either.
Scorpion and the Frog Has anybody documented the number of times the Scorpion and the Frog parable has been used in movies and TV since The Crying Game? I can't remember hearing it prior to that, but I'm starting to think it gets into every TV series at some point. The Dresden Files made reference to it in the last episode and I heard Chakotay tell it in a Voyager rerun last week, which is what got me thinking about how many times I've thought "not the Scorpion and the Frog again" since Forest Whitaker told it to Stephen Rea.
And, by the way, KSR's Sixty Days and Counting came out today. Finally. It's been a long wait, especially since I've been bogged down in The Historian for weeks now ... I doubt you were tempted, but I can tell you if you were, don't bother. It's crap. Kostova's bloodless prose is uniquely unsuited for telling vampire stories. Bulgarian travel guides, maybe, but not vampires.
I'd never heard of Elizabeth Enright's children's novel The Saturdays and it's certainly not what I read as a kid. First published in 1941, The Saturdays is the first book of the Melendys, four kids living with their father in a four story "mistake" of a house in New York City. The kids figure out that if they pool their allowance, one kid per week can have some sort of adventure that would otherwise be out of reach.
Nothing magic happens, but The Saturdays is something of a fantasy to today's reader. The kids are all bright and get along with minimal supervision. They play elaborate and well-thought out games and make-do with whatever beat-up toys and cast-offs they have. They can wander around New York without parents. Scary old ladies become generous and interesting friends, Dad understands - rather quickly - why his daughter went out and cut off her hair, and kids who have lost their mother get to spend the summer in a lighthouse. You want childhood to be like this. The view of 1940 New York is kind of interesting too. Cops that have faces like hams, the older kids are aware of World War II, and none of the destinations have those ubiquitous allowance-suckers, gift shops. The Saturdays is the kind of book you might give to a more mature kid and even then it might not be appreciated for years, but it belongs in the pantheon of Great Kids Books.
In my quest to read the book about the political build-up to the Iraq war, I finished Michael Isikoff and David Corn's Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. It's very good, but not definitive. The outing of Valerie Plame gets a lot of attention and Judy Miller of the New York Times has probably never looked worse. The authors document the backstory of three accusations propping up the Iraq menace: uranium in Niger, aluminum tubes, and mobile labs. How easily these could have been kicked out from under the blustery, lying, incompetent Bush adminstration shocks even a cynic like me. Of course, that would have taken an aggressive media, a bold opposition party and maybe somebody inside Bush's bubble willing to say no.
Anneheart's on a quest to read 100 books in '07. I'm not going to make it - without counting kids books anyway - if I keep hitting books like Fiasco and Hubris. I did tear through the second, but neither were particularly lively and both were, obviously, depressing.
I'm almost embarrassed to say how good World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is. Maybe because I'm not much of a fan of horror movies or books. Or maybe because the premise - this is a collection of interviews with survivors of a particularly gruesome future history - seems kinda lazy. But that set-up allows author Max (son of Mel) Brooks to tell a global story, from the first outbreak to humanity's fight back. He goes from Chinese submariners to Canadian mounties to Indian doctors.
Occassionally this comes across as "zombie short stories," but the stories are compulsively readable. Prop up the book while you do dishes readable. Some are even moving. It takes the living dead to bring out the best in us. I wouldn't want to try and prove it, but this is probably the first zombie novel to rely on contemporary politics and national character to tell its story. Brooks has also given an enormous amount of thought to what a global zombie outbreak might mean for things like the oceans, the borders, and Russian religion. Unfortunately, Brooks is no stylist. The differences in language and story-telling between his interview subjects are not quite large enough. (Seriously, no one needs a translator?) Also, too often his people seem like they're talking to someone from 2006 (the reader) and not someone from their time (the "interviewer"). So, literary masterpiece it's not. But a zombie masterpiece. Easy.
You know how they say the mark of a great book is it changes the way you look at the world? Well, for several days now, every time I enter a room or a building I look around and think, "Where are the weapons? Where are my escapes? How can I block those doors?" I didn't say it changed the way I see the world for the better, just changed it.
Page to Screen After seeing the eerie trailer for Little Children, I'm looking forward to it much more than I was just based on the book. The book's by Tom Perrotta, who wrote the brilliant Election - basis for the equally brilliant movie. But Little Children, the book, is only partially as good. The adulterous relationship that clicks the plot in motion just sort of happens. No reason or chemistry. Also the creepy elements of the book never seem to really jell with the satirical elements. Election was pitch perfect on this, but Little Children has the elements kind of side by side. From what I can tell, Director Todd Field - who did the terrific adaptation of In the Bedroom - solves these problems two ways. First, Jennifer Connelly looks kind of like Demi Moore during the bangs phase, easily explaining the husband's desire to run away with Kate Winslet. Also, based on the trailer, there's no overt comedy here, which is probably for the best. Can't wait.
The trailer is also a study in marketing. Watch it and you have no idea that a pedophile on the loose is a major part of the plot. (They've kept it in, I can tell by the pool scene.) Adulterous sex with Kate Winslet sells. Creepy pedophile neighbors, not so much.
The Black Dahlia, I'll watch, but I'm not looking forward to. Brian DePalma should maybe stay away from femme fatale type things for a while. Maybe forever. Also, just think of the tough cops in L.A. Confidential, also based on a James Ellroy book. Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kevin Spacey. Would the name Josh Hartnett follow? Except maybe if they did some kind of "L.A. Confidential, coming soon to the W.B.!"
Fast Food Nation. I picked up this book thinking I'd skim a few pages and I wound up devouring the whole thing in a way I used to devour chicken nuggets circa 1986. It would be a slam dunk as a documentary, but they've decided to fictionalize it. The trailer, however, features a pretty funny Greg Kinnear. Make me laugh, tell me how gross the burgers I don't eat are, and I'll like your movie.
I caught the trailer for Fast Food Nation in front of Little Miss Sunshine, which was not based on a book but on a surprisingly clunky screenplay. Dysfunctional family parade, dysfunctions made funny, dysfunctions explained with a few tears. Welcome to indie movie 101. Yet ... I laughed a whole lot. The cast makes this movie much better than it might otherwise be. Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carrell and Alan Arkin are just masterful. The two kids deserve even more credit, being kids and all. There are enough really funny scenes that you can overlook some of the problematic bits. You may be laughing so hard at the final scene you don't really notice that the idea behind it is kind of schizo and a pedophile gets the big laugh (that he probably won't get in Little Children). Few movies deliver more than you expect, and Little Miss Sunshine does.
I can recommend all these books and, so far, one movie.
Dread Reckoning, all about Richard Matheson's great novel I Am Legend, possibly spends too much time talking about Romero's zombie movies, but is still a decent read and might jazz you up to read or re-read the book. It also reminds you that a big-time movie is coming down the pipe starring Will Smith. Is it me, or should I Am Legend maybe not be a big budget, quip-tastic summer movie? Smith is still better than the original lead, the Governator.
Double Shot of Books It's been a while since I've read any of the original Ian Fleming James Bond books. It's easy to forget how much like period pieces they can be. Thunderball works like a James Bond template. There's the humor. M, on a health kick, deems his top agent is no longer in top shape and sends him to detoxify at a natural living farm. After days of grousing, lemon tea and nearly being killed by this strange thing called "traction," Bond actually thinks his new dry life suits him ... until he gets back into action and realizes that if he's going to have any effectiveness as a two-fisted man of action, he'd better get back to cigarettes and bacon. There's two insane coincidences. (While at the health farm, Bond has a run-in with a key agent of SPECTRE, who figures later in Operation Thunderball!)
Best of all, there's the crazy archvillian, Emil Largo, who gathers his subordinates around a big table, gives a big speech and ... and ... I can barely type this ... kills one of his underlings by pushing a button and electrocuting him. If only he'd been stroking a white cat! Anyway, later on he steals a nuclear weapon and ransoms NATO for 100 MEE-lion pounds. Fleming describes him as big and hairy, but he looked like Dr. Evil to me. Anyway, much fun is had and Bond foils the plot. He does this - template alert - not with spying or detecting, but by sleeping with Largo's mistress. Oh James.
Also, you have to read the books to remember that back in the day a geiger counter hidden in a camera was a big deal.
For those who think Paul Auster's writing is fairly cold, opaque or overly philosophical, Brooklyn Follies should come as a complete surprise. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if this were written by a woman, it would either be or be considered an Oprah book, since it concerns families, failure and redemption. Nathan Glass returns to Brooklyn to end his miserable, lonely life. Instead of quietly dying, Nathan runs into his nephew Tom Wood who, though only half Nathan's age, is alreadly as lonely and miserable. Tom, a once-promising intellectual and future English professor, is one of the best characters I've come across in a while.
By reaching out, Nathan and eventually Tom just get in the habit of reaching out more. Their journey from isolation to immersion in a compelling cast of family extras is a genuinely exciting story. Maybe I like old cynics, burnt-out grad students, flambouyant con-men and weird kids more than the average reader, but I think this should be a bestseller. (Although there is one plot point strange enough to be in a Bond book.) This is easily Auster's most accessible book and I'd say his best. (Also, likeThe Squid and the Whale, this is set in Park Slope. Coincidences all over.)
