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Cahiers du Cinéma: I watched Gatsby so you don’t have to.

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Yes, I finally went to see it. Yes, I even sprang for the 3-D version. I run a full service blog here.

tl,dr: Wait for it on cable.

Notes:

      • This is a highly personal reaction, influenced by a lot of things. In particular, I think I have a weakness for 1920′s era flapper outfits. But Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan are both just…wow. I don’t know how I can put it without lapsing into the vulgar. Perhaps I should just say I would be delighted to take either one (or both) of them out for a cheeseburger and the amusing house red. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to post this is so I could link to photos of both young ladies. Ms. Debicki:

        and Ms. Mulligan:

      • Tobey Maguire did not work for me as Nick Carraway. I felt that he exhibited a limited emotional range: either vaguely petulant or slightly baffled. When he did try to express happiness or friendship, he seemed stiff.
      • Jay Z’s music was…well, let me be polite and say simply “not memorable”.
      • The 3-D does not add much to the movie. There are a few neat tricks (the closing credits in particular are kind of trippy in a geometric sort of way), but I don’t believe you’ll miss anything if you stick with 2-D.
      • There were more than a few CG shots in the movie that were so poorly done and so obviously CG that they took me out of the movie. Luckily, all I had to do was wait for Ms. Debicki or Ms. Mulligan to come back on screen…
      • Other than the bad CG, though, there is a lot of lush and beautiful photography in the movie. It is pretty to look at…
      • …but ultimately empty. I think the biggest failure of the movie isn’t in conveying Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy; that comes across just fine. The point that I think Baz Luhrmann missed (along with Craig Pearce, the other credited screenwriter) is that Daisy is an unworthy vessel for Gatsby’s affection. Tom and Daisy are empty, shallow, vain people. Gatsby’s death isn’t the tragedy; the true tragedy is that he brings about his own end through his pursuit of Daisy, and that Daisy isn’t worth it. Luhrmann fails to develop Daisy in such a way that we’re able to see this. Towards the end of the movie, Maguire in his voiceover quotes the classic line about Tom and Daisy being “careless people“, but reading the words isn’t the same as demonstrating this to us.

I’m glad I went: it was, after all, a nice afternoon out at a nice theater. But I can’t recommend purchasing a ticket until The Great Gatsby comes to cable or the discount theater nearest you.

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Movies | No Comments »

Week of Gatsby: Day 5.

Friday, May 10th, 2013

I hate being backed into a corner.

One of the reasons I wanted to do “Week of Gatsby” was so I could link to the classic Andy Kaufman routine from “Saturday Night Live”. I didn’t think that would be the problem it turned into.

That clip is not available, in any form, on the Internet, as far as I can tell. NBC Universal, as the copyright holders, seems to aggressively go after anyone who posts SNL clips on YouTube (as is their right, of course).

That clip is also not available, as far as I can determine, in Hulu’s library of SNL clips.

You can watch the entire episode with Kaufman (season 3, episode 13, with Art Garfunkel and Stephen Bishop) on Hulu – if you pay $8 a month for Hulu Plus (or sign up for a free trial). Otherwise, you’re out of luck. I say: to heck with that.

The text of Kaufman’s routine is available from the SNL Transcripts site, but reading the text of a Kaufman routine is like dancing about architecture.

This, however, might make the effort worthwhile: from a Cornell website, the “New Student Reading Project”, some notes on Gatsby. Chapter 7, “Performing Gatsby“, is rather interesting, especially for the comments by some of Kaufman’s contemporaries on his routine.

David Brenner: “And, you know, people would boo the crying. They were New Yorkers.”

(Also: a young Sam Waterson? This I’ve got to see. Was the man ever “young”?)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, TV | 4 Comments »

Week of Gatsby: Day 4.

Thursday, May 9th, 2013

Following up on a previous entry: it is legal to download Gatsby in every country except for seven. The United States is one of those seven.

If you happen to live in a country other than those seven – say, for example, Australia – it is perfectly legal for you to download Gatsby from the local version of Project Gutenberg.

Also, I wanted to link to this week’s episode of “The Ihnatko Almanac”: (Edited to add: Fixed. Thanks, Lawrence.) Andy Ihnatko touches on Baz Luhrmann and Gatsby, though his primary topic is one we brought up the other day: Sebastian Faulks continuing the Wodehouse Jeeves novels.

(I also wanted to link this because if you listen to the first couple of minutes, you’ll hear a name you might recognize.)

(Important safety tip: be careful who you page, and who you send feedback to. They just might read your name on the air. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Geek, Law, Safety | No Comments »

Robert Anton Wilson, call your office, please.

Thursday, May 9th, 2013

According to the Smoking Gun website, Guccifer has previously claimed that “his hacking interest revolves around exposing members of the illuminati.” Former targets have included Bush, members of the Council on Foreign Relations, prominent economists and a Federal Reserve Board official.

Guccifer’s latest target: noted Illuminati member Candace “Sex and the City” Bushnell.

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Random notes: May 8, 2013.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

“I have no idea, I have no idea,” said Philip Levine, the former United States poet laureate, who has lived in Fresno since the late 1950s. But his enthusiasm was tempered by worries over the proliferation of poets laureate. “If you gave the Congressional Medal of Honor to everybody who got drafted, in a way you water down the award,” he said. “Do all these towns need a poet laureate? That’s what I wonder. Does Fresno, for that matter?”

(Fresno is paying their poet laureate $2,000 for a two-year term.)

Paging Andy Ihnatko. Andy Ihnatko to the white courtesy phone, please.

(Seriously, this does not strike me as a good idea.)

“When things got tough or extremely difficult on the House floor, we could count on Jesse to bring levity to an otherwise daunting situation with a bad joke or a one-man skit,” she wrote. “Jesse was the highlight of our karaoke nights and always made everyone feel like an integral part of, and not apart from, various activities.”

“She” is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Edited to add: Ken over at Popehat has a post up flaming the LAT and other newspapers (and, sort of by implication, your obedient servant) for seizing on the karaoke angle and taking out of the context it was in.

More guns, less crime.

The Statesman has been all over the collapse of RunTex (a local running shoe store, which was also active in various community events) like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition. I haven’t paid much attention to the story because I’m not a runner and didn’t care about RunTex. I remember my sister (who competes in triathlons) telling me about going there a while back and being totally unable to find any shoes that fit her. (And my sister does not have giant mutant feet.)

In that vein, I found this Statesman column rather interesting. It looks like my sister wasn’t the only person who had that problem…

On recent, long Saturday runs with my Gazelle pace group, when the conversation meanders from work and family stories to movies and smoothie recipes, someone occasionally would mention that they had tried to buy a pair of shoes from the Riverside location’s diminishing selection. Stories of failed attempts to buy new shoes resonated. “I used to shop there all the time” had become a familiar sentence.

Edited to add: A friend of WCD told us a similar story in email; he went in looking for the Nike shoes that would work with their iPhone application and transmitter. They didn’t have any shoes in his size, let alone the Nike ones. When he inquired, they told him “We’re not a shoe store. We support the running lifestyle.”

“We support the running lifestyle.” WHAT THE FRACK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

“We’re not a shoe store.” Yeah. Now, you’re nothing.

This is just further evidence towards my theory: the problems with the American economy have much to do with the fact that nobody wants to take money for goods and services any longer. I’m not kidding: I can’t count the number of experiences I’ve had, or been told about recently, involving wanting to make a purchase and not being able to get help, get questions answered, or get people to take money.

Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns | 1 Comment »

Week of Gatsby: Day 3

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Why isn’t “The Great Gatsby” in the public domain? F. Scott Fizgerald has been dead for nearly 73 years, after all.

This is 19 Zillicoa Street in Asheville, North Carolina:


View Larger Map

This building is Homewood. Homewood was part of Highland Hospital, and was the home of Dr. Robert S. Carroll and his wife, Grace Potter Carroll. Dr. Carroll ran the hospital, and his wife taught music lessons. (Nina Simone was one of her students.)

In 1939, Dr. Carroll turned management of the hospital over to Duke University’s Neuropsychiatric Department. It was while Duke was managing the hospital that the final act of a great American tragedy took place.

On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out at Highland. Various reports say the fire started in the kitchen and moved upwards through the dumbwaiter shaft. The fire escapes were made out of wood and also caught fire. By the time it was extinguished, nine women were dead.

One of the women who died was Zelda Fitzgerald, the widow of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Zelda had a troubled life. I’m not an expert, but the consensus opinion I’ve seen is that she probably suffered from some form of bi-polar disorder, and medicated herself in an attempt to deal with it. She was in and out of Highland between 1936 and her death.

This is the closest thing I could find to an obituary for Zelda Fitzgerald. (Local cache if that doesn’t come up.) I hope wherever she is, she found the peace that evaded her in life.

(Information about Highland Hospital drawn from the NPS page.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Gatsby, Law | 1 Comment »

Week of Gatsby: Day 2

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

Real estate people like Gatsby.

There are the Gatsby condominiums on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Fitzgerald apartment building on the other side of Central Park. There is a Gatsby Lane carved out of a subdivision in Montgomery, Ala., where Mr. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, was raised. And there is a 50-year-old company created by the real estate titan Peter Sharp and his longtime partner, Norman Peck, that still exists today.

That company, by the way, is “East Egg”.

In the novel, Mr. Peck explained, wealthy people, including Jay Gatsby, lived in a fictional part of Long Island called West Egg, “but the better people lived in East Egg.”

In other news, have you driven a Gatsby lately?

(Nice looking cars, but not $34.5K worth of nice looking in my opinion. Assuming these people are still building cars, which I admit is a questionable assumption.)

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Gatsby | No Comments »

Awards season.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Pop quiz:

Fäviken: Understanding the Genius Behind the World’s 34th Best Restaurant

Is that a headline from the Onion, or a real article from a food blog?

Answer: That’s a real article in the current “issue” of Dark Rye, which won the James Beard Award for “Best Group Food Blog” this year.

In conclusion, we introduce the RITUAL edition of Dark Rye, which is to say CIRCLES – that’s where it’s at. The essence of ritual. It all begins when we rise once again to make the perfect cup of coffee. We scramble eggs. Butter toast. Breakfast preparation as meditation.

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

Sorry. Where were we?

Again. Always again. Days as snakes that swallow their tails. Months, moon cycles. The ceaseless rotation of seasons. From Big Bang to apocalypse. From the eruption and destruction of every single moment – now, now, now. We’re born. We die. Who doesn’t dig a juggler?

I’d write more on the subject of “Dark Rye” (Why does the design make me stabby? Why are they endorsing the crank theory of Ayurveda?) but Ryan Sutton over at “The Bad Deal” has already made about as pithy a comment as I’ve seen.

(I know there are some people in my audience who feel that New York in general, and New York dining specifically, is overblown in the food news/food blog scene. I kind of agree with this in general: when it comes to Sandy, though, that was one of the most important food stories of the year, and there were lots of real food blogs that covered it well.)

In better news, the Edgar Award winners have been announced. I like Dennis Lehane a lot, so I’m pretty happy Live by Night won. I have a copy somewhere, I think, but I haven’t read it yet; or, for that matter, the other nominated novels. (I am also kind of happy that Ace Atkins got a nomination for a non-Spenser book.)

True crime: I didn’t read any of this year’s nominees. Midnight in Peking looks interesting, but I never got around to picking it up. I probably will next time I’m at Half-Price. The other book people were talking about was People Who Eat Darkness. My problem with that is: I’ve already read about the Lucie Blackman case in Jake Adelstein’s excellent Tokyo Vice, and I’m just not all that damn interested in reading about the case again.

Critical/biographical: I hope The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics is a swell book. I thought Books to Die For was a worthy nominee and a delightful book, so Scientific Sherlock darn well better be an even better book.

I finally got my hands on a copy of In Pursuit of Spenser just this past Friday, so I can’t comment on it yet. I suspect I will be writing a longer review/appreciation once I do finish that book. But it is a promising sign to me that three of this year’s nominees for best novel were also contributors to Pursuit. (Lehane, Atkins, and Lyndsay Faye, in case you were wondering.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food | No Comments »

Week of Gatsby: Day 1.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

In honor of the forthcoming movie, I am declaring this week the “Week of Gatsby” on WCD. Mostly for my own personal amusement.

Today’s entry: The Great Gastby for NES, a browser based game in which you wander around Gatsby’s party, throwing your hat at various targets and searching for the titular character.

(Yes, I am planning to see the movie. Yes, in 3D. “Argo” was the last thing I saw in a theater, and I figure I could use the diversion. Even if it is a pile of crap.)

(And, yes, as it happens, I do like the book. A short defense of it is here.)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Geek, Movies | No Comments »

Firings, obits, and other things: April 23, 2013.

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

Firings: Mike Dunlap, Charlotte Bobcats head coach. One season, 21-61.

Obits: Richie Havens. NYT. LAT. A/V Club.

E. L. Konigsburg, noted author (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler). NYT. LAT.

This is one of those little tidbits that I find fascinating: “From the Mixed-Up Files…” won the Newbery Medal in 1968. That was Ms. Konigsburg’s second book. Her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was the runner-up that year. (She won a second Newbery medal in 1997 for The View from Saturday.)

Mrs. Konigsburg, who spent a year teaching high school science, was an unabashed information-pusher. Children’s books, she once said, are “the key to the accumulated wisdom, wit, gossip, truth, myth, history, philosophy, and recipes for salting potatoes during the past 6,000 years of civilization.”

There will probably be more to say about this tomorrow, but Allan Arbus has also passed away.

In other news, while I was out and about having fun, Lawrence was working. Specifically, he’s been posting video of the Travis County DA being arrested for DWI, and of the DA in jail.

And what do I have to offer to compare with that? Pictures, maybe?

IMG_0607

Here we see the elusive Mike the Musicologist. While Jim attempts to throw a net over him, let me tell you about Mutual of Omaha…

And one for my great and good friend Weer’d Beard: ducks!

ducks

Posted in Books, Clippings, Firings, Law, Music, Sports, TCDA, TV | No Comments »

Also noted.

Monday, April 8th, 2013

Anne Smedinghoff was killed by an IED in Afghanistan on Saturday. Four other Americans, who have not been identified, were killed as well. Ms. Smedinghoff and the others were part of a “delegation accompanying the governor of Zabul Province to inaugurate a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital. She was to help deliver donated books.”

I note this here because I actually heard about it before the NYT covered the story. I don’t know exactly how I found this, so I can’t give credit, but there’s a very nice tribute to Ms. Smedinghoff at a blog called “Email From The Embassy”.

I think there’s a lot that could be said about the importance of books, but I will let the author of “Email” say much of what I want to say:

We find them where they are, and we give them these small gifts from America, about America. We teach them to read, to think critically, to smile broadly. We show them, through our books, that America is a vast and wonderful place, full of all sorts of people and amazing ideas. So: a small, small program. And yet so big. What could be bigger than a book, really?

This is what Anne died doing. It is important. Her work was important. And I’m betting that if she’d reached that school yesterday, she would’ve had an amazing story to tell. Those schoolchildren would have each gotten their own books, still smelling of glue from the print shop. At least one of those kids would have hugged her by way of thanks. And she would have gone home smiling.

Awful damn dusty in here. Maybe I need to clean the HEPA filter.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | No Comments »

“…jackass legislation”

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

I am a great admirer of H.L. Mencken. I have been since I was in high school (mumble mumble) years ago.

But I had not previously encountered this particular essay.

The new law that it advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down. It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.

Also noted:

What would become of the millions of revolvers already in the hands of the American people if not in New York, then at least everywhere else? (I own two and my brother owns at least a dozen, though neither of us has fired one since the close of the Liberty Loan drives.)

I would be very interested in knowing what revolvers Mencken and his brother owned. I’d be even more interested in owning one of Mencken’s revolvers, but I suspect the associational value puts that out of my price range.

(It does not come as a great shock to me that Mencken was pro civil rights: his “A New Constitution for Maryland” included a provision establishing the right to keep and openly carry arms. But encountering an essay of Mencken’s that I haven’t previously read, and is relevant to my interests…that lights up my whole day.)

(Hattip on this one to the amazing Roberta X.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns, History, Law | 1 Comment »

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