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| 0316478520
| 4.00
| 309,850
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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really liked it
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If I'm earning an MFA in Creative Writing from YouTube University (as well as streaming platforms like MasterClass), then Malcolm Gladwell is one of m
If I'm earning an MFA in Creative Writing from YouTube University (as well as streaming platforms like MasterClass), then Malcolm Gladwell is one of my professors. The New Yorker staff writer never ceases to teach me something mind-blowing about storytelling. Published in 2019, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know is the first of Gladwell's non-fiction books that I've read. It focuses on the interactions and assumptions we make when dealing with strangers. Gladwell closes the book with an examination of the events that led to the suicide of Sandra Bland in 2015, three days after being arrested in Prairie View, Texas for a traffic violation. He also delves into the blunders and miscues that led to Adolph Hitler, Cuban spy Ana Montes, Ponzi scheme scammer Bernie Madoff, gymnastics coach Larry Nassar and football coach Jerry Sandusky winning trust while committing historically terrible acts of abuse or subterfuge despite sounding all sorts of warning bells. -- Winston Churchill, for example, never believed for a moment that Hitler was anything more than a duplicitous thug. Churchill called Chamberlain's visit "the stupidest thing that has ever been done." But Hitler was someone he'd only ever read about. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain's cabinet ministers, was equally clear-eyed. He listened with horror to Chamberlain's account of his meeting with Hitler. Later, he would resign from Chamberlain's government in protest. Did Cooper know Hitler? No. The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours. -- A few years ago, a team of psychologists led by Emily Pronin gave a group of people the same exercise. Pronin had them fill in the blank spaces. Then she asked them the same question: What do you think your choices say about you? For instance, if you completed TOU_ _ as TOUCH, does that suggest that you are a different kind of person than if you completed it as TOUGH? The respondents took the same position I did. They're just words. But then things got interesting. Pronin gave the group other people's words. These were perfect strangers. She asked the same question. What do you think this stranger's choices reveal? And this time Pronin's panel completely changed their minds. "He doesn't seem to read too much, since the natural (to me) completion of B_ _K would be BOOK. BEAK seems rather random, and might indicate deliberate unfocus of mind." Keep in mind that these are the exact same people who just moments before had denied that the exercise had any meaning at all. The same person who said, "These word completions don't seem to reveal much about me at all" turned around and said, of a perfect stranger: "I think this girl is on her period....I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship, according to the words WHORE, SLOT (similar to SLUT), CHEAT." The answers go on and on like this. And no one seemed even remotely aware that they had been trapped in a contradiction. -- Ana Montes wasn't a master spy. She didn't need to be. In a world were our lie detector is set to the "off" position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it. And was Scott Carmichael somehow negligent? Not at all. He did what Truth Default Theory would predict any of us would do: he operated from the assumption that Ana Montes was telling the truth, and--almost without realizing it--worked to square everything she said with that assumption. We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high. Carmichael was nowhere near that point. In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time. You ask your husband if he is having an affair, and he says no, and you believe him. Your default is that he is telling the truth. And whatever little inconsistencies you spot in his story, you explain away. But three months later you happen to notice an unusual hotel charge on his credit card bill, and the combination of that and the weeks of unexplained absences and mysterious phone calls pushes you over the top. That's how lies are detected. -- To Encinia's mind, Bland's demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She's agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she's hiding something. This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched; when they do not behave the way we expect them to behave. Amanda Knox was mismatched. At the crime scene, as she put on her protective booties, she swiveled her hips and said, "Ta-dah." Bernie Madoff was mismatched. He was a sociopath dressed up as a mensch. What is Sandra Bland? She is also mismatched. She looks to Encinia's eye like a criminal. But she's not. She's just upset. In the aftermath of her death, it was revealed that she had ten previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including five traffic stops, which had left her with almost $8,000 in outstanding fines. She had tried to commit suicide the year before, after the loss of a baby. She had numerous cut marks running up and down her arms. So here's a troubled person with a history of medical and psychiatric issues, trying to pull her life together. She's moved to a new town. She's starting a new life. And just when she arrives to begin this new chapter in her life, she's pulled over by a police officer--repeating a scenario that has left her deeply in debt. And for what? For failing to signal a lane change when a police car is driving up rapidly behind her. All of a sudden her fragile new beginning is cast into doubt. In the three days she spent in jail before taking her own life, Sandra Bland was distraught, weeping constantly, making phone call after phone call. She was in crisis. But Encinia, with all the false confidence that believing in transparency gives us, reads her emotionality and volatility as something sinister. Talking to Strangers is not about how to spot a liar or predator. Gladwell cites that judges, police detectives and federal agents are able to detect a lie no better than 50% of the time, a coin flip. Gladwell's thesis is that society can only function when we trust in each other, as opposed to assuming deceit is lurking around every corner. In instances where that trust is violated, those who made nothing of the signs were being human. Gladwell's storytelling is second-to-none. I'm not an audiobook consumer but this would be an excellent one, following the structure of Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History and including the original audio files in the Bland incident. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 18, 2023
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Apr 21, 2023
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Dec 29, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1250301831
| 9781250301833
| B07QSPPLQQ
| 4.09
| 3,389
| Feb 04, 2020
| Feb 04, 2020
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really liked it
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My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making
My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making of Chinatown, cited by many as the greatest screenplay ever written. Even more so than Peter Biskind's supreme account of 1970s Hollywood (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), Wasson recreates entire conversations. I found that approach a little dubious, got accustomed to it and most enjoyed the chapters devoted to author Robert Towne's writing process and the genesis of his script, particularly the help he received from his friend Edward Taylor, girlfriend Julie Payne, dog Hira and director Roman Polanski, uncredited for his work on the script. -- "You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in the 60s," said record producer Kim Fowley. "And you wanted to get there because these places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there." L.A.'s music scene, Fowley added, was so hungry for talent that "anybody who had charisma or a line of bullshit could walk into any record label and get a deal--maybe just one record, but that's how it worked." -- Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before--his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader--it was the loss that got him. Chandler's detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. "I used to like this town," Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either." "In reading these words and looking at these pictures," Towne said, "I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left: the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost." -- Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones' when Towne first proposed the idea. "Look," Towne said. "We can't get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It'll be L.A. in the thirties." "Sure. Sounds great. What's it about?" "I don't know." Then: "Water." Jack would be Towne's detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clothes horse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. "Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils," he would say, smiling. Towne's detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective--gruff, high-minded, ascetic--all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, "[In] most detectives I have ever seen--[and] in Chandler and even Hammett--all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. 'If you want someone for that go down the block.' But I knew in fact that that's mostly what they did." For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Towne's hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. "I thought that taking someone like that," Towne said, "maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting." He decided, whenever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. "So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were," he said, "because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn't want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective." [image] -- Under Towne's desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with. Distraction--this was how it always started. "So much of writing," he said, "is trying to avoid facing it." -- For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn't know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn't know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn't start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn't outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn't he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slow, one short inch at a time. -- By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily. "'Chinatown' by Towne'" one began: "Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.'s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings on in Chinatown." If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, "do as little as possible." -- Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write--and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets--but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them--that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would ever make such a movie? -- "To say Edward Taylor was Robert's 'editor' was an understatement," said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed." [image] -- By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. "In those days," Payne said, "you could not pay Robert to write if he didn't want to write. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote only for love." Warren Beatty would call Payne: "How's it going?" "Slow. Robert won't put a word on the page until he thinks it's perfect." "If he ever asks you what you think, don't say anything, because he'll stop." And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages. "What do you think?" Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made. "Shorter." She hocked her diamond earrings. -- Julie exiled him to Catalina Island to get it done once and for all. It was the cheapest place she could find. At sixty-four dollars, she could rent an entire seaplane--room enough for Robert, Eddie, Hira, two IBM Selectric IIs, and provisions--and a room at the Banning Lodge, a funky bed-and-breakfast between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, wasn't much more. The trouble was the restaurant, the only place to eat in the area. It wasn't open on Sundays, so Julie would have to fly out on the seventh day, every week, with food for all purchased, in part, with money Jack Nicholson delivered to Payne while Towne was away. Money was that scarce. On Catalina: Towne sat in his bungalow, before his Selectric, before his window before the sea. -- "They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island," Koepf said, "and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages." -- "It's a sucker's game," Towne said of his profession. "But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that's exciting. Nothing can match that." "Sometimes"--a dreamer's word. -- Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. "Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything," Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, it not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding a universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. "Initially," Towne said, "I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous--a humiliation--and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn't want to be specific about it." But the more detail Towne revealed Gittes' first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes' tragedy--and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. "My own feeling," Towne said, "is if a scene is relentlessly bleak ... it isn't as powerful as it can be if there's a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what's bad almost worse ... In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil--if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified." This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. "You have to show violence the way it is," he said. "If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That's life. Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 10, 2023
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May 27, 2023
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Dec 12, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 031636553X
| 9780316365536
| B09SG13D2F
| 4.08
| 9,361
| 2022
| Oct 11, 2022
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liked it
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My introduction to Tricia Hersey is Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Published in 2022, this came to my attention via Carmen with her excellent recent
My introduction to Tricia Hersey is Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Published in 2022, this came to my attention via Carmen with her excellent recent review. I'd been watching YouTube videos in which women chronicle their experiences living in their cars and without referring to Hersey or the Nap Ministry, one of the Black "car lifers" presented Hersey's thesis: rest is a form of resistance against the machine-level pace of our culture and a key to surviving poverty, exhaustion, white supremacy and capitalism with our body and mind intact. -- When I started resting to save my life and connect with my Ancestors, I was a poor, Black, queer woman in graduate school on student loans with thousands of dollars in debt. I had been unemployed and underemployed since I was a full-time student worker in an archive library on campus barely making $12 an hour for a few hours weekly. I was also working for free as part of an internship for my studies while taking a full load of classes and caring for a six-year-old child. I am and was a first-generation adult graduate student with a child and a husband who was working fifty-plus hours a week to pay our rent while I studied. Once I finished my program, I couldn't find work in my field even after going on countless interviews. I remember sitting on my side of my bed crying because I had negative $25 in my bank account, no car and no savings. This is not a movement created by a person speaking about rest from some sort of position of privilege outside of being traumatized from capitalism and white supremacy. I'm telling you it's possible because I am the poster child and witness. Rest saved my life. -- I watched my father get up every morning at four a.m. He would drag himself out of bed to sit at the kitchen table to read three newspapers, study his Bible and pray silently. He would do this for almost two hours before he needed to leave for work at six. I remember asking, "Why do you get up so early when you don't have to be at work until later?" He replied, "I want to have a few moments in the day that belong to just me before I clock in." -- Resting can look like: 1. Closing your eyes for ten minutes. 2. A longer shower in silence. 3. Meditating on the couch for twenty minutes. 4. Daydreaming by staring out of a window. 5. Sipping warm tea before bed in the dark. 6. Slow dancing with yourself to slow music. 7. Experiencing a Sound Bath or other sound healing. 8. A Sun Salutation. 9. A twenty-minute timed nap. 10. Praying. 11. Crafting a small altar for your home. 12. A long, warm bath. 13. Taking regular breaks from social media. 14. Not immediately responding to texts and emails. 15. Deep listening to a full music album. 16. A meditative walk in nature. 17. Knitting, crocheting, sewing, and quilting. 18. Playing a musical instrument. 19. Deep eye contact. 20. Laughing intensely. -- The concept of filling up your cup first, so you can have enough in it to pour to others feel off balance. It reeks of capitalist language that is now a part of our daily mantras. Language like "I will sleep when I am dead," "Rise and grind," "While they sleep, I grind," "If it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense," "Wake up and hustle," and many more. The cup metaphor also is most often geared toward women, who, because of patriarchy and sexism, carry the burden of labor. Marginalized women, specifically Black and Latina women, make up the largest group of laborers in a capitalist system. Our labor history historically has been used to make the lives of white women less hectic and more relaxed. So when I hear and see this "filling your cup" language repeated on memes on social media and in the larger wellness community, I realize that our view of rest is still burdened with the lies of grind culture. I propose that the cups all be broken into little pieces, and we replace pouring with resting and connecting with our bodies in a way that is centered on experimentation and repair. I don't want to pour anymore. One of Hersey's contributions is being an advocate for rest. Everywhere we turn, there are apostles for productivity: growing faster, advancing further, earning more, boosting your numbers. Slowing down, taking a breather, or daydreaming are practically heretical. The very thought of quitting seems hateful to most westerners. It makes me wonder who's benefiting from these narratives. Not people who are content with what they have. I was relieved to find reinforcement here that I'm already doing a few things on Hersey's list: taking long showers, a half hour nap after lunch on workdays and taking a walk when I get home. Hersey includes a few personal anecdotes and I would've liked much more of that. Most of this manifesto is repetitive, with words like "grind culture," "side hustle," "white supremacy" or "capitalism" repeated over and over and over. I would've preferred a book that included interviews with social scientists, teachers, caregivers and others discussing how they burned out, how they benefited from rest and what that looked like for them. This manifesto is a good starting point, but my recommendation is to put your $13 toward rest and instead of buying this ebook, search Tricia Hersey on Google or YouTube. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 12, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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Dec 11, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525508848
| 9780525508847
| B07PZ4H1N2
| 3.85
| 95,643
| Oct 15, 2019
| Oct 15, 2019
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really liked it
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Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life was a stocking stuffer I was happy to treat myself to. Published in 2
Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life was a stocking stuffer I was happy to treat myself to. Published in 2019, Ali Wong captures the verve of her stage act in print, the hook being it's a family history and wisdom for her daughters, Mari, born in 2015, and Nikki, in 2017. There's no avoiding that this is another stand-up comedian fulfilling the terms of a book deal, but I find satisfaction in studying how a performer's childhood, love life, and writing process varies from case to case, and Wong is especially candid. Warning: There are parts raunchier than her Netflix specials. I laughed often. -- Well, let's just get right to it: I dated a series of men who had issues getting it up. It felt like a curse. Five guys in a row lost their boners in the middle of getting busy. Part of me blamed Raynaud's disease, a condition that was passed on to me by my father. I have extremely poor circulation to my hands and feet, to the point where, in the cold, they will turn blue and feel like pain icicles. So, especially in the New York fall or wintertime, my bare hands, much like the hands of Rogue from the X-Men, could suck the life out of a man's erect penis. -- I made it to thirty-seven weeks and they tried to induce me. I had contractions for twenty-four hours but my cervix was still only dilated half a centimeter. It hurt like hell because I was trying to push a cantaloupe out of a hole the size of an apple stem. The doctor offered to put some medical balloon up my pussy to open up the cervix more, which to me sounded like some sort of interrogation torture tactic. Clowns have always scared me and while I've slept with two homeless people, I really didn't want to get fucked by a balloon. Despite the nurse's discouragement, I decided to go straight to the C-section. It was the first lesson in having kids: You cannot control anything. -- Stand-up is not supposed to be warm and fuzzy or welcoming. If it was, everyone would do it. Some people think that stand-ups are all dysfunctional or have mental health problems or bad families. But I think all you need to be a good stand-up is to have a unique point of view, be funny, and enjoy bombing in front of strangers. You really do have to learn to like bombing a lot. Even now, when the audience is too good, sometimes I think, I didn't deserve that. You'll know you're a stand-up when, after a spectacular bomb, you don't feel like you want to quit, but instead the opposite: You want to go up again. -- As a female comic, it was always hard to not date a stand-up comedian. Mostly because when I dated men outside of stand-up comedy, their attempts at funny made me cringe. One guy pointed to an escalator that was out of order and said to me, "Escalators that are out of order are basically temporary stairs." I said to him, "That's a Mitch Hedberg joke." He said to me, "Oh, I just came up with that thought on my own by myself." Shut up, you fucking liar. -- Pretty much the worst thing about being a woman in stand-up is that you are always forced to socialize with male stand-up comics' girlfriends. You become a babysitter for these poor women. At a club once, this comic dumped his life-sized Barbie doll of a girlfriend next to me, like, Hey, can you watch this? To be fair, she was perfectly nice and was showing me all this fancy stuff on her body that her boyfriend had bought her. "I mean, just look at this diamond. It's a honey diamond, which I think is a very chic alternative to a basic diamond. Honey because it's the color of honey!" she exclaimed as she searched for light to rotate her wrist in, to maximize the sparkle on her finger. "Look at my Casio digital watch," I replied as I offered my wrist to her hands. "It cost me $19.99, and it displays the time AND the date!" She didn't get the sarcasm and instead pretended to just be super impressed. "Oh my God! That's really umm ... useful and such a neat retro watch! You're like one of those kids riding a bike in E.T.!" -- Cuisine: Vietnamese Good Signs: Opens at seven A.M.; closes at eight P.M. The back of the menu features advertisements for local dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. All the employees wear open-toed shoes. There's a Buddha by the cash register. There are red fake candles with incense burning. Waiters have long fingernails that may touch your food and that's okay. Cash only. The name has a number in it (yes, I know this is already in Baby Cobra but it's important, dammit!). Bad Signs: Customers are eating pho with a fork. The waiters are white. They take American Express. They don't serve tripe or tendon. They serve chicken breast. The name is some unfunny punny bullshit like "Pho Gettaboutit" or "What the Pho." -- The movie High Fidelity came out when I was a junior in high school. John Cusack's character goes through five different relationships. The statistics teacher asked us how we felt about it. Everyone except me said they found it depressing. They all thought they were going to marry their high school sweethearts (so naïve!). Older people know that you have to go through multiple relationships to find the right one. You will probably go through three to five serious relationships in your life before finding your person, if you're even lucky enough. Older people found the movie relatable and uplifting because even though John Cusack's character doesn't end up getting married, he does end up with a woman where he can comfortable and himself. But I didn't have to see High Fidelity to know this was true. I had witnessed it all through my siblings. -- Have your bachelorette party at Disneyland. After I had my miscarriage, my best friend came to L.A. I wanted to feel like my old self and be able to make light of the situation so we got extremely high. We each ate half of a chocolate cannabis heart. Later, a co-worker told me I should have eaten an eighth of the heart. Soaring over California was magical, because I was so high. And It's a Small World made me feel like the world really was small, after all (I was high as shit). Space Mountain made me feel like I was in space (I don't think I've ever been that high). But then Indiana Jones was awful. That big ball threatening to crush me and that huge snake hissing in my face felt like I was about to die in the worst way possible. Do not get high and then go on Indiana Jones. Consider this your one and only warning. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 18, 2022
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Dec 05, 2022
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ebook
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| 0063112582
| 9780063112582
| 0063112582
| 4.06
| 11,285
| Oct 2022
| Oct 25, 2022
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it was amazing
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Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award
Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, who's directed nine feature films from his screenplays--Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill among them--with no bad ones. The "worst" feature in Tarantino's filmography--my vote there is for Django Unchained--is better than the very best some other filmmakers can boast of theirs, and as this book demonstrates, his ideas for movies he could make but would prefer just to speculate about are more compelling than a lot of what gets produced. Tarantino bookends with a memoir, sketching for the reader what "Little Q" was up to in Los Angeles of the 1970s, not only what movies he was watching as a boy, but where he was watching them, who he was with, and how those adults impacted his development. The core of the book are enthusiastic essays on more than a dozen films he bought tickets for in this formative period, from 1972 to 1981, with many footnotes and asides along the way, as well as sourcing from directors he's talked to, like Peter Bogdanovich, Walter Hill and "Big" John Milius. -- Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, "Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie's not going to hurt you." Right fucking on, Connie! After being exposed to all these images, did any of them disturb me? Of course, some did! But that didn't mean I didn't like the movie. When they removed the naked dead girl out of the hole in Dirty Harry, it was totally disturbing. But I understood it. Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. But just listing grotesque moments--out of context of the movies they were in--isn't entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother's point of view--that she later explained to me--was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story. -- Now, I knew of Super Fly because she already owned the smash hit soundtrack album, and it was played constantly in the apartment. The movie was also advertised heavily on Soul Train. And in our apartment, come Saturday, we never missed Soul Train. By this point I was living with my mother in a pretty hip apartment building that she shared with two cocktail waitresses that were her best friends at the time, Jackie (black) and Lillian (Mexican). All three were young, hip, good-looking women in the funky seventies, with a penchant for dating athletes. Three sexy women (at the time my mother looked like a cross between Cher and Barbara Steele), one white, one black, one Mexican, sharing an apartment with the white one's ten-year-old son: we were practically a sitcom. -- The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve's success as a movie star can't be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve's agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She'd read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up in him reading the one Neile liked the most. Now of course the director was important, how much they were paying him, the location they were shooting the film at--all those things were important. But so was Neile weighing in. Naturally, directors who'd worked with Steve before--that he liked--got preferential treatment. But if Neile didn't like the script, it was an uphill battle. And it was thanks to Neile's good taste and her keen understanding of her husband's ability and his iconic persona that she steered her husband, starting with The Cincinnati Kid, into the biggest winning streak of the second half of the sixties (a Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed). -- I've always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel's, Kaufman's, and Ferrara's). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen bears out this sinister interpretation. If you're one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you're more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You're reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are you inhuman? Of course, they're vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don't have a sense of humor, they're unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That's a rather species-specific point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it's a stretch to say it's what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions--love, joy, happiness, amusement--come negative emotions--hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. -- I saw Alligator three times that year (one of those times was on a triple feature with Rolling Thunder and a Canadian trucker flick called High-Ballin' with Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed), and I agreed wholeheartedly with Kevin Thomas about the charm of Forster and Riker. So much so, when I did my top ten movies at the end of the year, and wrote my little awards (best actress, best actor, best director) it was Robert Forster who was my choice for best male performance of that year (Robert DeNiro for Raging Bull was number two). Fifteen years later, I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel's likable lead male character, bail bondsman Max Cherry. I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. I watched the movie again and felt that the character from Alligator could be Max Cherry, just fifteen years earlier. So I started writing the script as if he was, right down to the discussion with Jackie about his thinning hair. Would I have done that without Kevin Thomas highlighting Forster so positively in his review? No. In the end, what made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of seventies and eighties film criticism, he seemed liked one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job, and consequently, their life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend. In 1994 I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of L.A. critics, my first remarks to the room were: "Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like." -- I remember, before seeing Stallone's film, being at some neighborhood kid's house and the TV spot for Rocky came on. The kid wondered out loud, "What's that?" And his mother glanced at the TV screen and said dismissively, "Oh, just another movie about some guy and his problems." Today it's very easy to romanticize that cynical seventies era--especially since it's long gone--seemingly never to return. But from 1970 to at least 1977, every other movie that came out did seem like it was about "some guy and his problems." Part of the elation tied to the audience's response to the climactic fight in Rocky was after five years of seventies cinema, we didn't really expect things to work out for Balboa. And I don't even mean we didn't expect him to win the heavyweight championship of the world. He was never going to fucking win! We just hoped he didn't look like a fucking joke. That's why the ending was so surprisingly moving and cathartic. That's why when he knocked Apollo Creed flat on his back we hit the roof. Because from that point on, no matter whatever else happened, Rocky proved he wasn't a joke. But by the time you get to the last round--and Rocky has Apollo Creed on the ropes--hitting him with a left and a right and a left and a right and the crowd in the boxing arena was chanting: "Roc-ky ... Roc-ky ..." Oh my fucking god! There had simply never been anything like it. -- So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier? His name was Floyd Ray Wilson and he was a black guy of about thirty-seven, who for about a year and a half in the late seventies lived in my house. He used to date my mom's best friend Jackie and he hung around in their circle. Years earlier, from time to time, he would visit the apartment my mom and I shared with her roommates Jackie and Lillian. And every time he came by it was exciting, because I thought Floyd was really cool and I could talk movies with him. And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up (at least compared to the adults I knew). He especially knew all the action movies and Blaxploitation films. I remember when Jackie introduced us (I was ten), she said, "Quentin, Floyd's who you should talk to about movies. He knows as much as you." So I--a ten-year-old white boy--started testing this grown-ass black man on his knowledge of black movies. "Do you know who Brenda Sykes is?" I tested. "Of course I do," he said. I told him, "I think she's the prettiest black actress in movies." "You damn right she is," he answered. "What's your favorite Jim Kelly movie?" Again a test. If he answered Enter the Dragon, he's just like everybody else. "Three the Hard Way, obviously," he answered correctly. Lillian just stared at the two of us and said to the room, "I don't know who any of these people are." So from that moment on, whenever Floyd visited the apartment, it was practically like a holiday for me. Because finally, I was going to be able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking about. So when Floyd would come over I'd attach myself to him like a tick. But also during this time, I realized the hard way that Floyd was a flakey guy who couldn't be counted on. On at least two occasions when Floyd was visiting, he played the big man and told me he'd come over next Saturday to take me to the movies. In spite of its fantastic title, Tarantino devotes just one chapter to "cinema speculation,” imagining Brian DePalma—one of his favorite directors from this era or any other—directing Taxi Driver instead of Martin Scorsese. (Tarantino envisions a political thriller in DePalma's hands, with Jeff Bridges playing Travis Bickle instead of Robert DeNiro, Amy Irving or DePalma's future wife Nancy Allen playing Betsy with more screen time, and a bravura assassination attempt edited like the prom massacre in DePalma's Carrie). Diagnosing movies like The Getaway, Deliverance and Rolling Thunder, he does inevitably tease us with what a Tarantino remake of those guy classics might look like. It's the autobiographical sections of Cinema Speculation that struck a chord with me. By no means comprehensive--his biological parents are sketched more like older siblings than parents and with no explanation, Tarantino casually mentions his mother sending him to live with his "alcoholic hillbilly" grandparents in Tennessee--but I recognized the devotion to watching, cataloging, writing about and even making scrapbooks on movies as a child, as well as his education working at a video store (Tarantino refers to Video Archives the way college grads do their alma maters). Cinema Speculation also did something that's almost unheard of when I finish a book. When I was done, I sat down and wrote a film essay of my own, speculating how director John Carpenter's career might've turned out if The Thing, today regarded as a masterpiece, was a commercial or even critical success in 1982. While I wouldn't put Tarantino's book on the shelf right next to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Tarantino doesn't instruct anyone how to write or direct a good movie, per se) they are related in that I came away with a profound appreciation for the craft and my own potential. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 4.12
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| Dec 28, 2020
| Jun 08, 2021
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really liked it
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Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker who in addition to authoring ten non-fiction books is a playwright and screenwriter. Published in
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker who in addition to authoring ten non-fiction books is a playwright and screenwriter. Published in 2021, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid is a brisk, informative look at how Covid-19 developed and affected health, politics and culture in the first months of the pandemic. This wasn't a comprehensive dive into the pandemic and even longer books could focus purely on the medical, public policy or sociological chronology, but I admire and trust Wright's reporting and learned a lot. -- Covid-19 arrived in America at a vulnerable moment in the nation's history. The country was undergoing a wrenching political realignment, brought to a head by the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whose policies on trade, deficit, alliances and immigration were at odds with traditional Republican conservatism. His election pulled the country further into a cataclysm of identity politics, shrinking the GOP into a pool of aging white voters who felt disparaged, resentful and left behind. The #MeToo movement had ignited an edgy dialogue between the sexes. As the stock market soared, long-delayed questions of income disparity and racial justice were pressing forward. Every dissonant chord among the parties, the races, and the genders was amplified within the echo chambers the fractured communities had made of themselves. -- Matt Pottinger handed out a study of the 1918 flu pandemic to his colleagues in the White House, indicating the differing outcomes between the experiences of Philadelphia and St. Louis--a clear example of the importance of leadership, transparency, and following the best scientific counsel. His brother, Paul, the infectious-disease doctor at the University of Washington Medical Center, kept him appraised of the ravaging infection in the nursing homes in the Seattle area. "I'm watching [a patient] die of this now," Paul texted from a nursing home. "He beshat himself, flooded his toilet, caused a flood, and the shitwater dripped into the floor below. A literal deadly shitshow." -- For most people, including politicians, the threat in February still appeared small. More than a month had passed between the first confirmed case in the United States and the first known death. "It's going to disappear," President Trump promised. "One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear." As the president was making this prediction, 175 employees of the biotech firm Biogen were heading home. They had gathered on a wintry weekend at the Marriott Long Wharf hotel in Boston Harbor. Many had traveled from other states and foreign countries. At the time, only fifteen confirmed cases of Covid-19 had been diagnosed in the U.S.--just one of them in Massachusetts. Among the international attendees were several from Italy, which was under lockdown in the northern part of the country. The employees sat close together in the banquet rooms during sessions and socialized at the end of the day. They rode on elevators together and spent time in the gym. On Sunday, as the conference closed, they went home, carrying the virus to Boston or its suburbs; they journeyed to various states, including Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana; they flew back to Singapore, Australia, Sweden, and Slovakia. Soon, many fell ill. -- One of Senator Patty Murray's relatives had been in the Kirkland facility a few years before. "It was within a short amount of time I began hearing from my family and friends, 'Oh my gosh, I've got the worst flu I ever had, I got this cold that won't go away, this cough that won't stop, my kids are sick.'" Some of her own family were extremely ill. Murray told them, "Go get a test," but they replied, "I can't get a test. I've asked my doctor. I've asked the public health people in the county. I've called the state health people--nobody has these tests." Her state was in turmoil. At the end of February, the Senate Democratic caucus went on a retreat in Baltimore. Murray received a text from her daughter, whose children were in school in the same neighborhood as the initial nursing home outbreak. "They closed the schools," her daughter said. "Kids are sick, teachers are sick. This is really frightening." Murray called the school principal, who told her 20 percent of the children in the school were ill. Murray told her colleagues, "My granddaughter's school closed today. This is coming for you." -- The New York City Health Department felt muzzled by the mayor. "Every message that we want to get out to the public needs to go through him, and they end up getting nixed. City Hall continues to sideline and neuter the country's premier public health department," a health official complained in early March. "He doesn't get it," the official wrote in another memo. "Not convinced there's a volcano about to blow beneath us." Insurrection was afoot. There was talk of delivering an ultimatum to the mayor. "Either pivot to pandemic planning today or they start to deal with a health department that won't follow his orders." Mayor Bill de Blasio was under the spell of an email from Mitchell Katz, the CEO of New York's sprawling municipal healthcare system, who counseled the mayor to keep the city open. "Canceling large gatherings gives people the wrong impression of this illness," Katz wrote. "If it is not safe to go to a conference, why is it safe to go to the hospital or ride the subway?" He argued, one the one hand, that the "terrible problem" in Italy was unlikely to happen in New York and, on the other, that many New Yorkers were going to get infected anyway. "Greater than 99 percent will recover without harm. Once people recover they will have immunity. The immunity will protect the herd." The mayor then went on Morning Joe and said a number of things he would soon regret, starting with his pledge to keep the schools open, even if students fell ill. "If you're under fifty and you're healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there's very little threat here." -- On a sunny afternoon in April I went for a jog on a school track near my home in Austin. A group of young women were running time trials in the hundred-meter dash. They were the fastest people I had ever seen. Occasionally, as I came around a curve, I'd pull even with one of them just as she was taking off. It was like Wile E. Coyote eating Road Runner's dust. Their feet rarely touched the track. There was an element of flight. "What school do you guys run for?" I asked one of them, who was cooling off. "Oh, it's not a school," she said, and then added, "We're Olympians." Instead of competing in Tokyo, here they were, on a middle-school track in Austin, trying to maintain peak condition as they waited for the games to be rescheduled. So many dreams had been deferred or abandoned--weddings canceled, funerals avoided, high school musicals called off, vacation plans dropped, and businesses closed. After seeing what happened to New Orleans following Mardi Gras, the mayor of Austin shut down South by Southwest, one of the biggest sources of revenue in the city. My niece Elizabeth Shapiro fronts a ten-piece jazz band in L.A., Lizzy & the Triggermen, and SXSW was going to be her big breakthrough. There might be other chances, but would the band even survive the shutdown? -- One can speculate on the farce of a man living in a basement of a vacuum shop nominating himself to overturn the social order of the state, but the prospect of a total reversal of fortunes animated his dream. Adam Fox was unwanted--by his ex-wife, by his girlfriend, by the society that wouldn't give him a prestigious job--and the distance between who he was and who he wanted to be was so great it could only be closed by force. Governor Whitmer was a woman, attractive, powerful, popular. There was talk she might be picked as Joe Biden's running mate. Fox would strip her of her authority. He would take charge, subjugate her. It was a kind of rape fantasy, one that Whitmer would recognize: she had been raped when she was young. -- At the beginning of the pandemic, China's unprecedented lockdown, compared to the initial halting reaction in Italy, suggested that autocratic systems had an unbeatable advantage in dealing with a contagion like that of SARS-CoV-2. Over time, however, democratic regimes found their footing and did marginally better than authoritarian ones. Advanced countries performed better than developing ones, but not by as much as might have been expected. Due to the high volume of air travel, richer countries were quickly overwhelmed, while poorer countries had more time to prepare for the onslaught. High-tech medical advantages proved of little use when the main tools for countering the spread of the disease were social distancing, hand washing, and masks. This can be seen in the rankings by the Lowry Institute of the performance of countries managing the pandemic. The top ten countries are: New Zealand Vietnam Taiwan Thailand Cyprus Rwanda Iceland Australia Latvia Sri Lanka The United States ranked number 94 out of 98, between Bolivia and Iran. China was not included in the rankings because of the lack of transparency in its testing. What I appreciated most about The Plague Year were the stories Wright shares illustrating that Covid-19 had a profound effect on society that goes deeper than a bad outbreak of the flu. Wright devotes many pages to the George Floyd murder and the protests of August 2020. I didn't know that Floyd had lost his security job in the shutdown and was killed for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Covid contributed to Floyd's death and the displacement of so many more lives of people like me, who as of today, a Pfizer vaccine and two boosters later, hasn't gotten sick. I recommend this book for those who enjoy Wright's writing and have questions about the pandemic. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 28, 2022
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Sep 06, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1789090555
| 9781789090550
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| 4.72
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| Jul 23, 2019
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it was amazing
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Moving into an apartment and stocking a proper bookshelf, the first new book I purchased was The Making of Alien by Jonathan W. Rinzler. Published in
Moving into an apartment and stocking a proper bookshelf, the first new book I purchased was The Making of Alien by Jonathan W. Rinzler. Published in 2019, this large book (337 pages of text supported by color photographs and artwork) was commissioned by Twentieth Century Fox. They chose Rinzler, author of many similar books on the making of the Star Wars series. Alien is my favorite movie. I've seen it in theaters eight or nine times. I thought I knew everything about the making of it, but this comprehensively packaged book features terrific stories and stunning visual aids I'd never seen before. -- "I was aware of Planet of the Vampires," O'Bannon said. "I had seen clips from it and it struck me as evocative. It had the curious mixture that you get in those Italian films of spectacularly good production design with an aggressively low budget mentality." Decades later, O'Bannon would admit: "I stole the giant skeleton from Planet of the Vampires," but would add that he'd been primarily influenced by Clifford D. Simak's "Junkyard," published in a 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction; space explorers alight on a blighted asteroid where they discover a graveyard with a wrecked alien spacecraft; they also come upon a stone tower into which one astronaut lowers himself through a hole in the top. "I don't steal from anybody," O'Bannon said. "I steal from everybody." [image] -- "Before we could sign the contract with Roger Corman," Shusett would recall, "Dan and I were walking down the street, and we saw a guy from film school named Mark Haggard. Dan said, 'I want to ditch this guy. He's always telling me he can find money to make movies, but he never has yet.' We ran across an alley but Mark called, 'Dan, Dan! I hear you got a great script! Can I read it?' We said, 'Sure, everybody else is reading it.' We were too stupid to think anyone would rip it off because we didn't think it was good enough." Haggard drove over to Goldwyn Studios, where Brandywine had a ground-floor office. On the vast acreage of the studio, with its winding streets and standing exterior facades that were always being altered for period shoots, Haggard became disoriented. He couldn't find the right building. Instead, he stumbled up an alley that went by Brandywine's exterior wall. It was a hot July day, so Walter Hill and David Giler, two of the production company's three founders, had their windows wide open. Hill had finished his script for The Driver on May 23, and was working on a revision. "Everybody hears about scripts that came through the window," Giler said, "but in this case it literally did come through the window." -- It's possible things began to break Brandywine's way when Ladd heard good things about Star Wars from Steven Spielberg. The director saw an early cut, and telephoned Ladd to assure him that Lucas's film was going to be a smash hit. It may also be that Ladd saw Hill as similar to Lucas. They could both be seen as iconoclastic writer-directors, each with one film under their belt, doing something different in the science fiction genre. Lucas was making a space fantasy. Hill wanted to do science fiction/ horror. "I think the only person at Twentieth who really believed in this from the beginning was Alan Ladd," O'Bannon said. "The rest of the folks were split down the middle." Giler and Hill transformed the crew into what they called "truckers in space," as they would be referred to going forward. Among the truckers, they created class divisions based on job descriptions, and made engineers Parker and Brett moan about not receiving as much money as the others. Hill would say that the most significant difference between their rewrite and the original O'Bannon script was "the mood, the environment ... We added a rough contemporary quality that broke it out of the usual genre mold--the 'kiss my rosy red ass' and 'kill the motherfucker' kind of dialogue that historically you didn't find in science fiction movies." [image] -- Back in the UK, Lieberson had given the matter some thought and come up with Ridley Scott. He'd known the director for many years. He even had furniture designed by Scott in his apartment. They also had a mutual friend in David Puttnam, who had produced movies for Lieberson's company, Goodtimes Enterprises. "I called Ladd," Lieberson recalled, "and said, 'Listen, there is a director here. Ridley Scott, he's done one film. It looked fantastic; I've got an instinct about this guy.'" -- In the 40 to 90 minutes it took Scott to read Alien (accounts vary), he found a lot to admire. "It was unpretentious--and unbelievably violent--yet a lot of character painting came through. Characterization was in the attitudes, in the very Spartan choice of language, and what they talked about. An interesting social subtext emphasizing the class differences between the command officers and the guys sweating it out on the engineering decks. Hill writes a screenplay in a very communicative way. The image just comes bang at you, and you understand completely what is going on. It was minimal, but I got a great sense of the drive, the power of the script. And that's unusual. Hill and Giler were tough editors and the material was very well paced. Both great writers. Giler was probably one of the best writers in Hollywood at that point. Also, to me it was more than a horror film, it was a film about terror. The thriller aspects of it just leapt off the page. I found it very pure." -- By the time Scott was engaged in that series of crucial meetings, O'Bannon had received the hand-bound Necronomicon that Giger had sent him (although the American would remember the text being in German, not French). "I was really flattered," O'Bannon said. "He'd sent it to me because he wanted me to use it on the producers. He didn't think they were sufficiently impressed with his work. The book was brilliant--the man has a real knack for coming up with disturbing imagery." O'Bannon told Scott he wanted to show him something. "He produced The Necronomicon almost out of nowhere, like it was a dirty magazine or a dirty postcard," Scott recalled, "and asked, 'What do you think?' Dan wasn't actually quite sure about it. Didn't know what people would think when he showed it to me. It was a covert operation." With Carroll looking on, probably horrified, Scott opened The Necronomicon and leafed through its pages. "I looked down and saw this stunning picture, this remarkable half-page painting," he said. "I nearly fell over. It was the most frightening thing I'd ever seen. I have never been so sure of something in all my life. I thought we'd be arguing for months about what the beast was going to be. But I thought, If we can build that, that's it. I was stunned, really. I flipped. Literally flipped. I've never really been so shook up about anything. O'Bannon lit up like a light bulb, shining like a quartz iodine. It was then that I realized I was dealing with a real sci-fi freak, which I'd never come across before. I thought, My God! I have an egghead here. [image] -- To further illustrate his intentions, Scott locked himself in his RSA office part of each day to draw storyboards specifically for Alien. "At that time the budget was something like $4.5 million," he said. "And I was very well aware that we couldn't do it for that. There was a preliminary period of about six weeks, during which we had to work up a new budget. It was fairly apparent that a higher budget was inevitable. So when I came back to London to start casting, I also began work on a storyboard presentation to show Fox where the additional money would be spent." Although he wouldn't board out the entire film, Scott wanted to show Ladd and Fox how certain scenes would play and what they might look like. Fox agreed to wait and see before finalizing the budget. In this endeavor O'Bannon had also been invaluable, for he had also pressed for a visual representation so everyone was on the same page and understood what they were up against, as well as what they were going for. "The boards work for me," Scott said. "It's a way of expressing awareness of the medium. I was an art director before and to draw a sequence helps me think. Once the pictures are right, everything else starts to occur from them. I literally put down every thought I had in my head about how I wanted it to be." [image] -- At Shepperton, Weaver was taken through a display of Giger artwork by Scott. "They showed me the design and I was like, 'Woooo!'" Weaver said in 1979. "It was a wonderful exploitation of everybody's darkest fears. I thought, It's going to be beautiful and frightening at the same time." Later she'd say that she thought of the phase III alien: "This is a giant penis!" She was then toured around the stages, which left her "impressed by the people," the production crew of Alien. That night, "I sat down," Weaver said. "I thought, Well, Sigourney, you'd really better make up your mind if you want to do this or not. They've already flown you out here. If you don't, you better think about ending it. I thought about Ripley a long time before deciding I really wanted to play her ... "I liked that they had broken the rule and written two of the parts, originally designed for men, for women to play," she continued. "I remember thinking, Women aren't allowed to play these warriors and I've been handed this opportunity to play this woman who becomes a warrior and goes from someone rational to someone who's completely instinctive. There was a no-nonsenseness to Ripley. I think she grew up believing there was a certain order to things that could not be broken or changed. And her beliefs are exploded when she suddenly has to work on instinct and emotion. She has to make decisions she hopes are right, but she never will know for sure. I loved that uncertainty because that's something that could be quite frightening to me, to be responsible for a group of people. "I finally decided I really liked the character of Ripley, as well as the designs and Ridley Scott. Besides, I didn't want anyone else to do it. It wasn't until the day before I did the screen test that I thought, Yes, I would really like to do this, it's going to be interesting." [image] -- One eyewitness recalled Weaver screaming, Stanton being sick and Skerritt throwing himself back against a wall, "both hands covering his mouth, his eyes wide in terror"--but it was Cartwright who stole the moment. "One of the blood hoses happened to be angled right straight at Veronica's face," said O'Bannon, "so this jet of blood, about 3 ft. long, caught her smack in the kisser. The amount of blood was unparalleled. It knocked her right off her feet. She was screaming--it was pretty convincing. I was delighted!" "Veronica looked white and was shaking and she was crying as more blood kept flying around," Christian concluded. "Poor John Hurt was soaked in it, but kept on acting until Ridley softly whispered 'Cut.' Then they all stood around in shock, covered in splattered blood while the crew applauds. Two technicians rush over to help Veronica. They lead her off the set like some pitiful accident victim, visibly shaking. "Derek Vanlint rushes to the bathroom, clutching his mouth. O'Bannon walks up to Veronica, beaming: 'That was fantastic. What you did was incredible.' Veronica glares at him. 'Thanks, Dan.' She quavers, wiping blood from her mouth. 'But I really was sort of freaked out.' "Derek complimented me later," Cartwright said, "by saying none of it bothered him until he saw my face, then he ran off to throw up." [image] -- Although the Jones "family" cats were trained, when Weaver had to retrieve one on the bridge and put it in the box designed by Cobb, things bogged down. "They shot that scene time after time," said Cobb. "Here is the entire crew of this huge spaceship set, the lights, the camera, the dolly, the director, the assistant director, and the makeup people, and the assorted little cat cages that they had full of cats for different takes. We're all sitting around, very tense, waiting. Everybody is being very quiet while someone is trying to get this cat to go to sleep on this control seat. Finally, the assistant director, with this very loud megaphone, says: "Stand by! The cat's lying down, the cat's lying down. Stand by!' Everybody's getting ready,. and finally he says, 'What? It's asleep! It's asleep!!' "But then the cat wouldn't be there when the camera panned down. Or the cat would jump on Sigourney as soon as she walked in. Or the seat would catapult forward and the cat would disappear into the rafters above the set for good. Then they'd have to get another cat until someone could find the first one. Then they have to be calm and wait for this cat to go to sleep. You couldn't get the same cat back into that seat after it had been frightened out of its wits. No way. For one entire afternoon, there were cats flying all over the place." [image] -- Because Fox executives had experienced a preview gone wrong a year before, executives in Dallas started to worry. (A scene in a film about Vietnam vets, Rolling Thunder, had actor Willian Devane put his hand down a waste disposal unit and grind it to the bone, which caused the audience to react viscercally and nearly attack Ladd; one account had his shirt ripped off.) Scott removed his dark blue jacket because he thought it made him look like an executive and a potential target. Because of the emotional responses, he then found himself in a debate about the sound level with Ladd in the foyer. "Laddie had come to argue with me," Scott said. "Laddie said, 'I'm getting a bit worried--we're overdoing things--this is too strong.' So I said, 'Nonsense. We're all right, we're in good shape,' but I noticed he was looking away and there was this incredible crash as an usher came through the door and collapsed. He collapsed! There was this huge thud and he landed face down on the tiles! The manager rushed in and said, 'Christ, this is too much, man!' and carried the usher outside to give him fresh air and pat his face. I went out and said, 'You must have eaten something. Do you feel all right?' And he said, 'No, no, I'm all right. That scene with the robot--he got his head knocked off! Who thinks of this stuff?'" "At that point, there was panic among the Fox ranks," Powell said. "'Are we going to get lynched?!'" Ladd had had enough. He grabbed his wife and ran for their car. Back in the theater, onscreen, Ripley was frantically running through the corridors looking for Jones. "Leave the fucking cat!" someone screamed. But the audience behaved themselves and the film came to a peaceful end. [image] Who needs film school when there are books like this? The Making of Alien features production art, storyboards, set photos and photocopies of documents, but I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes Polaroids most. Rather than look like it was made in the '70s, Alien is shot and edited in a way that looks like it was made today, and the Polaroids maintain that intimacy. I appreciated how thoroughly Rinzler tracks how much money was spent day to day; accounting is pretty boring and rarely mentioned, as if all you need in Hollywood is a good pitch and cash will just appear magically. This book reinforces how every minute of filmmaking is fueled by available money and fights over money. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 26, 2022
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| 1948226227
| 9781948226226
| 1948226227
| 3.97
| 1,678
| Aug 06, 2019
| Aug 06, 2019
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really liked it
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Readers wondering where the John Steinbecks of today are should look no further than Susan Straight. Author of nine novels and much short fiction, Str
Readers wondering where the John Steinbecks of today are should look no further than Susan Straight. Author of nine novels and much short fiction, Straight was raised in Riverside, where she co-founded an MFA program for creative writing at the University of California Riverside and is a Distinguished Professor of Creating Writing. Published in 2019, In the Country of Women is her first work of non-fiction. Her memoir is abundant with beautiful writing and powerful stories, many of them addressed to her three daughters and telling of her family history and their father's African-American family history. -- To my daughters: They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: "Her passage was worthy of Homer ... her voyage a mythic quest for new lands." Women don't get the Heroine's Journey. Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get "the epic novel," "the great American story," and Ken Burns documentaries. But our women fought harder than men--they fought men! Men who claimed to love them, to protect them, to help them--men who trapped and tried to kill them. They fought for sons and daughters, they had the battalions of their sisters and mothers and aunts. Some bad-ass aunts. The women used their cunning and their bullets, the power of their ancestors and of the other women in the wagon or the truck with them. They survived passages that would have made a lot of men quit. Sometimes the men did quit. Sometimes the women quit the men--to stay alive. -- Here in the land of tumbleweeds so immense and fiercely mobile, a windstorm in November sent so many skeletal balls of thorn blowing across the fields that the small house where my mother and I lived was buried in brown. It was a valley of granite boulders and turkey ranches. Tumbleweeds six and eight feet across packed in drifts around the windows, which were coated with dust from the famous Santa Ana winds. "It was like a snowstorm," my mother told me years later. "I couldn't even open the door." -- That we could control death and violence by writing about it was transforming. I had seen drug deals, wildfires, a man who held a woman so tightly by her hair that her temple puckered. Sometimes I was terrified. There was the man waiting on the narrow dirt path on the way to school, who opened his coat, a clichéd pervert (who the hell wears an overcoat when it's 100 degrees?), but I'd read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn four times by then, and Francie's mother shoots the pervert (he's called the pervert) in the groin, so I just glanced at him (pale and gross and oddly just like the novel) and ran into the weeds, wishing I had Francie's mother or her gun. The summer of 1970, the bookmobile arrived in far-flung neighborhoods like mine. No one wanted to accompany me, and I was thrilled. I walked alone through fields of wild oats, past the pepper trees under which older kids smoke marijuana and drank Coors and listened to Grand Funk Railroad and James Brown on transistor radios, across the railroad tracks, down into the steep arroyo where a green trickle of water was my creek, and up into the grocery store parking lot where for two hours inside the air-conditioned hum of a converted buis, I read about death. I found S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with desperate, joking, hardworking boys as close to my own neighborhood as anything I'd ever read, and then, shaken, walked back home as the branches of the pepper trees shivered with electric guitars and laughter. Tulsa, I whispered. -- Fine as wine and just my kind. Bring your fine self over here. So fine you like to blind me when I saw you. This is what she heard, again and again. Daisy's first husband is listed in one census document as Calvin Morris, but no one left here has ever said they actually saw him. Daisy's cousin Jesse Wall, who'd also been born in Sunflower County and brought to California, told me back in 2014, when he was eighty, "Oh, Daisy was fine. Back in Arkansas, that man told her over and over, 'You're so fine, some fool's gonna take you away from me, and I can't have that, so I might just have to kill you first.' He had the gun on the table by the bed, and he'd sit there with it in his hand at night. And Daisy had the baby, Mary Louise. She had to wait until one night when when he left and she could get away. She took the baby and went to Oklahoma to find Sweet Annie." That was Daisy's aunt, Sweet Annie Tillman, legendary in her own right. -- I went to Planned Parenthood the week I turned sixteen because I was terrified almost every day of my life. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was poor and prey, and girls had told me where the building was because they, too, were afraid of the same thing. We were certain we'd be raped at some point, and we didn't want to have babies because of that. We didn't want to have to marry our rapists. -- My husband had become a mystery to me. He wanted more freedom to spend with his brothers and friends; he'd bought the Kawasaki, and a Ford Ranchero, which seemed another message as the back seat clearly couldn't hold three girls, the baby in a car seat. His mother was gone. She could not chase him home from the couch on Michael Street. We had gotten married too young, he said; he wanted to learn to be independent, he said. Every time I heard that word, I imagined Herbie, the elf who wanted to be a dentist, in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I couldn't help it. I heard the word in four syllables--in-de-pen-dent--in Herbie's nasal pronunciation, and had to keep myself from laughing. "You gonna be a dentist?" I'd say, and Dwayne would shake his head. In addition to the beauty of her prose, there are two other aspects of Susan Straight's writing that I draw inspiration from and both are present in In the Country of Women. As in John Steinbeck, Straight's characters desire, come together, get drunk, steal cars, throw punches, break up and struggle against authority (in no particular order). They're not concerned with being "nice." They're concerned with surviving in America. The other aspect that Straight demonstrates is that you don't have to go on expensive vacations to be a writer. You can bloom where you're planted, even if it's just above the poverty line in Riverside, and contribute to American literature. ...more |
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May 16, 2022
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Apr 23, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1590175220
| 9781590175224
| B005EH3BP0
| 3.87
| 303
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| Nov 09, 2011
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really liked it
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The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands was a Goodreads referral and a book I threw into my research pile (I'm not sailing away
The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands was a Goodreads referral and a book I threw into my research pile (I'm not sailing away to Jamaica anytime soon, I'm sad to report. The protagonist of the novel I'm writing grew up in the Caribbean, and I want to flesh out her childhood.) Published in 1950, this lengthy and quite detailed travelogue by Patrick Leigh Fermor is exactly what I wanted. He colors geography and history lessons with observations of customs and daily life, and does an excellent job of comparing and contrasting the islands. Here are some highlights: On Guadeloupe. The proprietress, a blonde, middle-aged Parisian, complained bitterly about the way the French West Indies were run, and hinted regretfully that all was far better in the British possessions, especially with regard to sanitation, roads, public works and discipline. I felt there was an unspoken corollary that the blacks were “kept in their place” better in the British possessions, and that, as a result, all were happier. Her conversation had an undercurrent of disillusionment that was to become increasingly familiar throughout the Antilles. On Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic.) The food in Roseau was pretty bad. After Martinique it was incredible that such disastrous results could be attained with the same raw materials. Terrible pink soups appeared, and potatoes disguised with Daddy’s Favorite Sauce, on whose awfulness it would be unpatriotic to enlarge. But the puddings were most interesting, and as we laboured with them, washing down intractable mouthfuls with Big Tree Burgandy, we invented names for them; a game that, in a perverted fashion, made us look forward to their appearance. But these experiences were unable to break the charm of Dominica and the Dominicans, and of the little capital. The maid in Sutton House was tremendously old, kind and motherly and appropriately called Nanny, whom the faintest suggestion of a joke on our part would send off into transports of delight. Seeing that we looked a bit hangdog over our meals, she brought us a plateful of fried frogs–cwapaud–which were very good indeed. It is a justly celebrated Dominican dish. On Barbados. The club system runs all through Barbadian life and the cold shoulder and the open snub are resorted to only when no legal quibble is available. It segregates the two races of islanders just as effectively as the most stringent colour discrimination in the United States, and not half so honestly. There, at least, loathsome as the American colour laws appear to me, Negroes knew exactly where they are. There is none of the mean juggling with the written word that prevails in Barbados, where, on paper, no colour bar exists. It is a pretty sad state of society when any white Barbadian or English pup can bounce in virtually where he chooses, while the elected head of Government, who is the island’s equivalent of the British Prime Minister, may have to hesitate and draw back. It must be one of the most disgustingly hypocritical systems in the world. Except for Canefield and the kindness of our hostess, it was without a pang that we flew away to Trinidad. On Trinidad. Drawing a comparison between Barbados and Trinidad is almost irresistible, and it is a contrast which, in spite of the beautiful churches and houses of Barbados and of the gracelessness and the sodden climate of Port of Spain, Trinidad, for me, wins hands down. Trinidadians are free of the characteristics which, among the Barbadians, impair the quiet beauty of the coral island; and whatever the colour feeling in Trinidad may be, it does not fly at you the moment you arrive and lodge in your gullet forever. The Trinidadians appear, by contrast, fantastically carefree and cheerful and definite, and the dominating attribute of the islanders, both black and white, is certainly their vitality. On Haiti. Smart life in Haiti–the dazzling white tropical suits, the dark heads and hands–resembles a photographic negative. Cabane Choucoune, the fashionable nightclub of Port-au-Prince, is perched on the mountainside above the capital in the cool suburbs of Petionville. It is a replica of an African kraal, a great cylinder of bamboo with a steep conical roof which simultaneously achieves, by skill twist of sophistication, the amenities, the low lights and the luxury of an expensive night club with the atmosphere of the dwelling of an equatorial monarch. Men in beautifully made white suits and dinner jackets danced with women dressed in the height of fashion. They were superb, far the best-looking we had seen in any of the islands: tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and long-legged, with a fine carriage of the head and great elegance of movement and gesture. What a relief to see this colour and splendour and extravagance after the shapeless dresses of the colonies! Many of our neighbours were pale in complexion, but the majority were of an imposing ebony. A woman sitting at the next table was perhaps the most beautiful in a room full of sable Venuses. Fermor reserves the most space for Haiti--three chapters in all--and takes a deep dive into the country's Voodoo rituals, spending multiple nights at ceremonies. He distinguishes between the bush medicine applications of the religion and its rarer but more sensationalized accounts of evil spells or sorcerers which have only grown more infamous in pop culture since this account was published. My takeaway is that there's something special in Haiti--beyond the white man's fascination with Voodoo--that resort loclaes like Jamaica, Aruba or the Cayman Islands do not offer and the media, reporting on natural disasters, do not capture. Recommended for those, like me, looking for a well-written and researched anthropological journey through the Caribbean. ...more |
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Apr 14, 2022
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Apr 28, 2022
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Apr 09, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 125024031X
| 9781250240316
| B0927D84L9
| 3.76
| 17,097
| Mar 15, 2022
| Mar 15, 2022
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it was ok
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My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women i
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation is my introduction to writer Erika Krouse and her document of being hired by a Colorado law firm as a private investigator. This memoir published in 2022 was a contrast between insights into the work of a PI and shockingly, developments or descriptions which are not conveyed in a way to be believable. I had to skim to finish this, always a bad sign. On paper, Krouse's background is one I should've found compelling. After earning her MA from the University of Colorado in 1996, her short story collection Come Up and See Me Sometime was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2001. By her account, temp jobs and subsisting at near poverty followed until Krouse encountered an attorney at a bookstore. Hearing himself share confidential matters with her (Krouse claims that she has a face which compels perfect strangers to confess their secrets), the attorney, who Krouse refers to as "Grayson," hires her to work part-time for his firm as a private investigator. With zero training and little guidance, Krouse considers quitting until Grayson asks her to interview his client "Simone Baker." In December 2001 while a student at Krouse's alma mater, Simone was hosting a girls-only party which twenty college football players and recruits crashed. Krouse later learns the players found out about the party from a female coed assigned to schedule activities for the recruits and who herself had been raped by a football player. Drunk, Simone was followed into a bedroom by between five and eight men, several of which raped her too. Grayson believes he can sue the university under Title IX rules for failing to protect the civil rights of its students. Excitement displaced my nervousness. I was going to work on a civil rights case. Me! I wrote down everything Grayson said: pervasive harassment, school's knowledge, deliberate indifference. Inequality. The phrase "deliberate indifference" ricocheted around my mind. Could indifference to crime be a crime? I had never imagined such a thing. Grayson said, "I want you to start discreetly gathering evidence. If we file, it'll be much harder once the university mounts their four-dog defense. So keep it quiet." "What's a four-dog defense?" Grayson recited, "One, that's not my dog. Two, if it was my dog, he didn't bite you. Three, if my dog bit you, it didn't hurt you. And four, if my dog bit you and hurt you, you provoked him." I thought for a second. "So they'll argue they're not responsible for the football players. But if they are, the players didn't rape your client. If they did rape her, it didn't hurt her. And if it did hurt her, she asked for it. Is that it?" Grayson said, "You understand this pretty well." Of course. I understood perfectly. I had to turn down this job. Krouse reveals to the reader that she too is a survivor of sexual assault. Her abuser--who she refers to as "X" and is possibly a father or stepfather--occurred between the ages of 4 and 6. Krouse has cut "X" out of her life but her mother, who is still with him, refuses to acknowledge or in any way help Krouse bring closure to what happened. This is possibly the worst mother ever depicted in print. Krouse even mentions that in the James Bond movies, the henchmen are more dangerous than the villains because they act out of love as opposed to greed. The mother is so deranged and the author so insistent on reconciliation with this person--to the point she has a nervous breakdown during her honeymoon and remains despondent for several years--that it overwhelms the story of the victims she's working with and the system they're trying to change. This is a landmark federal case about football, campus rape and coverup with dozens of victims, but the author--possibly using the same magic she employs to divine confessions--wants the reader to believe that she's the focus of the case. Erika Krouse writes about herself as if generating a character for a roleplaying game. Her ability to conjure secrets from anyone who gazes on her is the type of charisma normally reserved for wizards. Her knack for reconstructing conversations from memory is impressive, yet this power apparently evaded her when it came to earning a living wage. She chronicles her marital arts training, sessions which consist of bones broken and body parts sprained by male sparring partners whose behavior suggests diabolical sexism and sadism. I kept reading because the detail about PI work seemed real. I did have one small advantage: the sentence "I'm a private investigator." Those were words nobody had heard before in real life. I used them whenever I could. They made people feel important, thrown into some larger arena, like a character in a detective novel or noir movie. They agreed to meet with me to make the story real, with themselves at the center of it. They wanted to be the woman in the red dress and big hat, or the man at the bar on his fifth whiskey, paid for by me. A good memoir should leave no doubt that what being portrayed did actually happen. Several of the statements accredited to coaches or players are so brazen, so outrageous, so tone deaf that they stretch credibility even for the '00s. In the middle of all this, Krouse begins dating a marital arts PT who has the patience of a Buddhist monk. Based on the self-loathing the author uses to describe herself, it's baffling why this man stays with her (dating a private investigator is definitely not a reason). Much of the book seemed unbelievable to me, and for what needed to be a chronicle of campus sexual assault, that's bad. ...more |
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Mar 23, 2022
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Apr 13, 2022
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Mar 18, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525576258
| 9780525576259
| 0525576258
| 4.12
| 2,755
| Aug 18, 2020
| Aug 18, 2020
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it was amazing
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of m
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to read about a contemporary woman in the male-dominated field of astronomy. A compelling story would have to come from that. The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir is by Sara Seager, exoplanet hunter and MIT professor who among her professional honors has been profiled by the New York Times with the headline "The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth." I was hesitant because the book (published in 2020) deals with grief and Dr. Seager's recovery following the death of her husband in 2011. I wanted to read about space exploration, not sadness or support groups. I'm so glad I did. This memoir one of the best books I've read in the year of women. Not only did Dr. Seager offer an incredible amount of detail about what an astronomer knows and what she experiences, but she's a fantastic writer, weaving the fascinating story of her professional life with the surprisingly intimate story of her love life and how she's survived in both. -- I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters. Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own. Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers. But there's more to my love than that. When I think of the stars I feel an almost physical pull. I don't just want to look at them. I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth. I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone. Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me--but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new. -- Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him. He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month. I rejected him exactly as often. I thought I understood what he saw in me--I really was a pretty good skier--and maybe a little of what he saw in us. We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both loved the outdoors. That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together? The truth was, the highest register on the human-companionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didn’t bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason. -- I would be studying something a large percentage of the community thought didn’t exist or didn’t care to know about, and doing so in a way that made the impossible seem even less likely--like trying to prove that Bigfoot exists not by finding him or even his footprints, but by seeing his breath. How could we see the thin envelope of alien atmospheres when we couldn’t even find the world themselves? I was at a conference when a student from another school approached me in a whisper, asking if I wanted to talk to his adviser. He could explain to me why the Swiss signal couldn't possibly be a planet. A professor from Harvard, my own school, radiated a similar skepticism. We would never be able to detect many exoplanets, let alone their atmospheres. I remember feeling as though people were trying to rescue me from a cult. -- All the while, Mike and I continued our simple shared existence. I would go to school and get lost in space and code. I would come home to boats and piles of paper. Mike grounded my life, long stretches of brain peace. We never raised our voices at each other; I think back on that time and remember the quiet. We spent our evenings and summers in the near-silence of our canoe, making several more long trips north, and at home we lived together the way we paddled: It wasn’t always easy, because in some ways we remained two people who were built to be alone, but we worked to find a natural rhythm. We spent weeks at our respective work and weekends at our shared kind of play. We hiked and cross-country skied and paddled our way across stretches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont. There was still something almost accidental about our connection, and the increasing seriousness of it all sometimes daunted us both. But our pauses never became breaks. Within a year, we had really started to set up camp. -- “So, Sara, what do you do?” “I teach at MIT.” “What do you teach?” “Planetary physics.” “Wow. Um … what?” “I’m looking for planets outside our solar system. Other stars presumably have planets. I’m looking for them.” “Why?” “Well, I’d like to find other life in the universe.” “You mean aliens? You’re looking for aliens?” “Scientists don’t call them aliens. Other life.” “Right. So … Aliens?" -- The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end. Even among some astrophysicists, there can be such a thing as too much stargazing. A few dismissed finding exoplanets as "stamp collecting," an endless, meaningless search for new lights just so that we might name them. I couldn't convince the cynics otherwise. Despite the growing number of known exoplanets--by then about 150--people told me that I would never be able to achieve what I said I would. We would never see enough planets in transit to reach meaningful conclusions about them. The challenges would always be too great. My breakthroughs were mirages; my discoveries were flukes. -- Near the one-year anniversary of Mike’s death, Melissa came over to my house. She led me into the kitchen, made sure we were alone, and told me that I had to pretend, at least, to be interested in men again. Until I started dating, until I looked at a man with the intention of putting my mouth on his, my grieving would remain incomplete. I would always be looking behind me, taking stock of what was missing. I needed to see what else was out there. I knew what was out there. Thousands of billions of planets, orbiting hundreds of billions of stars. What enthralled me about The Smallest Lights in the Universe is how Seager wove her professional and love lives into one compelling story. What surprised me is how strong a writer she is. She communicates astronomy very well and with a certain wit attached. She compares the best pictures of distant objects to the earliest video games: pixels in different shades of white. Contrary to what I thought, astronomers don't gaze through equipment and see objects in deep space. Their targets are too far away for anything we've invented yet to "see." The workarounds are as much art as science. Much like this great book. Sara Seager was born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. Her father was a family doctor who went on to pioneer hair transplants for men. Her mother was a writer and poet. They divorced when Seager was young and she grew up avoiding the temper of her emotionally abusive stepfather. Diagnosed as an adult as being on the autism spectrum, Seager was socially withdrawn but gifted academically. She earned her BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1994 and her PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1999. Her research is focused on the discovery and analysis of exoplanets. Her husband and father of her two sons was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and eighteen months later, in 2011, died. With the help of a group she referred to as The Widows of Concord, Seager recovered and ultimately met an amateur astronomer at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's annual general assembly. They married in 2015. Dr. Seager is Professor of Planetary Science, Professor of Physics, and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in space (below is the photo they shot for the issue). [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey -- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone -- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling -- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 02, 2021
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Sep 02, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1492681083
| B088P55BM2
| 4.14
| 1,279
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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it was amazing
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of m
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to know from a woman what an astrophysicist does, why she wanted to go into this field and what experiences she's had there. A compelling story would have to come from that, a woman in a male-dominated scientific field. On this basis, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque surpassed all my expectations. Published in 2020, I finished this memoir with close to 10,000 words of notes, i.e. material. Here's a sample: -- The love of astronomy stuck in a way that my love of braces didn't. I was an early and voracious reader, and a few years after Haley's Comet, I was learning about star clusters and black holes and the speed of light thanks to Geoffrey T. Williams' Planetron books, which chronicle the adventures of a little boy with a toy that transforms into a magical spaceship and sweeps him off to explore the heavens. I have a strong memory of being five, reading about how fast the speed of light was, and repeatedly flicking the light switch on and off in my room to convince myself that yep, once I flipped it on, the light arrived pretty much instantly. That seemed pretty fast to me. Later, I inhaled every astronomy book I could get my hands on, watched Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye on TV, and went to every movie about scientists and space that came along. I remember particularly enjoying the movie Twister because it gave me an encouraging look at what scientists themselves might actually be like. The fictional tornado researchers on screen were doing cool and exciting research and having fun along the way, and the main character was a woman who rolled around in the mud and was obsessed with science but still managed to end the movie with a great kiss (a combination I'd already been warned might not be tenable in the long run thanks to plenty of other movies featuring women who Had to Choose between Careers and Men). [image] -- My dorm in particular was the stuff of anarchic counterculture geek dreams. When I turned up as a freshman, the residents were busy constructing a gigantic wooden tower that would ultimately stand more than four stories tall. As it turned out, this violated Cambridge building codes, so after a couple of days of climbing all over the thing and hurling water balloons from the top (it was impressively structurally sound; these were MIT engineers building it, after all), the tower was carefully lowered with much fanfare. In the next four years, I'd help my dormmates built giant catapults, human-sized hamster wheels, and even a roller coaster, all purely for entertainment and made primarily out of two-by-fours and optimism. MIT was my first real indication that the road to brilliance sometimes took a few turns that steered well clear of common sense. Through all of this, I remained convinced that despite my battles with coursework, MIT was the place for me. I wanted to be a professional astronomer, despite having only the vaguest sense of what the job actually entailed. I'd worked out early on that it meant being in school for the long haul--most astronomers I'd heard of had PhDs--and that I'd probably be using some very large telescopes at some point, but the details were unclear. I'd seen astronomers on PBS or in movies and imagined people sitting behind some enormous telescope situated inside a dome so they could ... do something. It looked fun, and I'd liked our backyard telescope, so I filed this away as something I'd surely figure out when the time came. -- It took just one night of observing for me to get hooked. I loved it. Loved gearing up and heading out into the cold clear autumn nights, loved juggling a log book and old computer and flashlight with frozen fingers, loved climbing a ladder and wrestling one of those fourteen-inch telescopes to point it perfectly toward a star of my choice. I loved the thrill that came when everything was working and I could leap back off the ladder to peer at some brand-new data and my own hastily scribbled notes, all under the dim red lights of the shed. (Many observatories used deep-red lighting at night to help preserve observers' dark-adapted vision). I have an abiding memory of standing in the November midnight cold, reveling in every perk of my teenaged metabolism as I downed Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful, and peering through the viewfinder of my telescope at the exact moment that a meteorite went streaking through its field of view from top to bottom. I was pointed at a miniscule area of the sky, and the odds of a meteor passing through that tiny spot at the very moment when I’d pressed my eye to the eyepiece were vanishingly small. I don’t remember crying out or saying anything or even moving. I just stood there, perched on a ladder, eye pointed through the telescope, knowing what I’d just seen. Yes, I thought. This is a good job. [image] -- One colleague has lucky observing socks she dons for every run; another swears eating a banana at roughly the same time every afternoon staves off clouds. People have lucky cookies, lucky snacks, even lucky tables in the dining room they’ll sit at before runs. I’ve developed the strict habit of refusing to check the weather until the day of the run itself. I tell myself that this forces me to always plan for a clear and productive evening, but deep down, it’s just as about not jinxing the night as anything else. Some astronomers also seem to have famously bad luck on observing runs. In a few cases, it’s gotten to the point where colleagues on the mountain will groan if they see one of their supposedly cursed colleagues on the schedule, convinced their mere presence will summon clouds or rain or high winds and extend their bad luck to every telescope unlucky enough to be nearby. -- I’ve disappointed plenty of people who have asked for the name of a random star only to be met with an “um …” or friends who have asked “Hey, what planet is that?” and gotten back “Er … I dunno … Jupiter, probably?” In astronomers’ defense, telescope computers are literally light-years better than we are, combining orbital dynamics and lengthy equations to pinpoint exact sky positions with a precision far exceeding anything we can distinguish with the naked eye. Still, it comes as a surprise to most people that many astronomers can’t really find that much in the naked-eye sky. -- The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around. -- If astronomers as a community were asked to pick a favorite observatory animal, it would likely be the viscacha. Viscachas are relatives of chinchillas but resemble wise rabbit grandfathers with tall ears, long curled tails, sleepy eyes, and long, drooping whiskers. They frequent many Chilean observatories, and their steady presence over the years has alerted astronomers to a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. They’re always there, always sitting stock-still, and always gazing directly at the sinking sun on the horizon. [image] Levesque discloses enough about her childhood and her academic and professional career for The Last Stargazers to be considered a memoir, but she also reaches out to a large number of her peers with questions like, Have you ever seen a UFO, or, for women, have you ever been harassed or made uncomfortable by men at work. She looks ahead to where her field is headed and how studying the physical nature of stars is changing. This would be a wonderful book to share with students interested in astrophysics (hint: take as many math classes as you can) or those like me curious about what an astrophysicist does and the adventures they have. Emily Levesque was born in 1984 and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. She received her S.B. in physics from MIT in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. She is professor in the University of Washington's astronomy department. Her research focuses on improving our overall understanding of how massive stars evolve and die. She's written two academic books: a professional text on red supergiants and a graduate textbook on stellar interiors and evolution. The Last Stargazers is her first book for everyone. She lives in Seattle, Washington. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey -- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone -- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling ...more |
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1
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Aug 29, 2021
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Aug 30, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1683691385
| 9781683691389
| 1683691385
| 4.07
| 4,081
| Sep 17, 2019
| Sep 17, 2019
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I read the first two sections of Monster, She Wrote. The subject matter is marvelous and I'm glad I bought a physical copy to keep on the shelf for re
I read the first two sections of Monster, She Wrote. The subject matter is marvelous and I'm glad I bought a physical copy to keep on the shelf for reference purposes. Many pioneering writers I'd never heard of are profiled. The book is written in a very, very contemporary and punchy fashion, like something in Entertainment Weekly. Oddly, I couldn't gather any momentum to finish it, any more than I'd have the energy to read an encyclopedia from cover to cover. I felt the writing came across as glib. Interesting subject, glib writing.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 28, 2022
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Nov 11, 2022
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Jun 20, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1510751769
| 9781510751767
| B07TH9N3X2
| 3.87
| 314
| unknown
| Feb 18, 2020
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did not like it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with The Science of Women In Horror: The Special Effects, Stun
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with The Science of Women In Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films by Meg Hafdahl. & Kelly Florence. I snapped this up on Kindle by virtue of the magnificent title and the fact that I am the demographic for this book. I never skip an opportunity to learn something about women in the horror genre, but I abandoned this book at the 15% mark. The writing is abnormally poor, hurling facts at the reader that are readily available on Wikipedia (like the Webster's definition of post-traumatic stress syndrome). The authors explore no film at any depth, skirting through plot and sprinkling in some quotes from the filmmaker, which anyone could read online. Those hoping for a book that documents the making of films like Carrie (not included), The Howling (not included), The Craft (not included), Jennifer's Body (not included) or Midsommar (not included) will be disappointed. Please do not buy this book sight unseen like I did. Read the first chapters before parting with your mad money. This subject matter deserves far more thought and effort than the writers gave it. Hafdahl & Florence have "written" two other books, one on Stephen King and one on monsters, all with "The Science of" in the title. This book certainly has the feeling of something that was cranked out to bring in a revenue stream. As a genre fan I was highly disappointed. Moving on, I'll share a few thoughts on the film that's not only my favorite Women In Horror but my favorite film of all time: Alien (1979). I've seen Alien in theaters every five years or so since the age of 14. I've studied the 177-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, The Beast Within, which you can watch on YouTube. YouTube also features Millennials or Gen Z recording their reaction to movies they're watching for the first time and Alien is a top selection for most of them. Men and women alike remain on edge for the entire film. And this is a so-called old movie from the '70s. It looks like it could've been made a few years ago. [image] Alien was so far ahead of its time that it's still out in front of how movies are written today. This can be best expressed by Helen Mirren, who in her MasterClass isn't discussing horror films or any film in particular but how actors can transcend traditional casting choices when she brings up Alien. She gives writing credit to the film's director Ridley Scott instead of the original screenwriters Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett, but her observations are on point: The first time I understood what was possible was I was privileged enough to read the script of Alien. I was up for a role in it, which I didn’t get, sadly. But I was privileged to read the original script, Ridley Scott’s script of Alien. And it was brilliant, because the way it was written, all the characters had names like Ripley, or, I don’t know, Tonn, they had these weird names that could be male or female. There was not a single direction in the script that said whether this was a man or a woman. It didn’t say, "Ripley is a tall, athletic woman with a fierce determination in her eyes," that sort of stage direction which you often get. So annoying. There were no stage directions at all for any of the characters, so any of the characters could have been played by a man or a woman. And that was such a liberating idea for me. I had never thought of that before. Thought that was possible. And there it was, laid out for me in this wonderful script of Alien. And from that moment on, it really transformed my thinking about who could play what and why. And Alien was quite a long time ago and it’s taken us all--and especially the world of producers and writers and directors--to catch up, and indeed the audience, to catch up. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey -- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone -- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling -- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque -- The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager ...more |
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1
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Oct 11, 2021
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Oct 13, 2021
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May 07, 2021
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ebook
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| 0525656766
| 9780525656760
| 0525656766
| 3.70
| 6,767
| Mar 30, 2021
| Mar 30, 2021
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really liked it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Sharon Stone and The Beauty of Living Twice. Published th
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Sharon Stone and The Beauty of Living Twice. Published this year, Stone charts the peaks and depressions of her extraordinary life so far, beginning her story at the ER bleeding in her brain and nearing death in 2001. Her childhood in Pennsylvania, modeling and acting career, tempestuous family, ten years of superstardom, sexual abuse by her maternal grandparents, philanthropic work and rehab from her stroke are explored. It's a harrowing trip. -- By not being put in a typical gender role-playing position at home, I was able to learn a lot of traditionally male-oriented skills, such as how to make and pour concrete, and how to lay a stone wall so it didn't fall over. All of us learned how to build a house, and since we grew up in Amish country, we learned it the Amish way, building the frame and the sides and then raising them with ropes. I mowed the lawn, shoveled snow, climbed trees, and played golf. I beat up my brothers, so I didn't get beaten up. Which is not to say there wasn't an absolute rule with Dad about not hitting girls; it was just that the boys didn't think it applied to sisters until we kicked their asses. [image] -- As a model, I was often called in to do the "difficult" jobs. I guess they thought I was the smarter, tougher one. Those jobs where they thought the guy might be tough, or the client hard to deal with. I worked with the Buf-Puf client who put me in a light box: a small box the size of my body lined entirely with lights, with a dish of water in front of me; I was meant to take the sponge out of it and show it to the camera near my face. She just kept telling me a thousand ways to say "Buf-Puf": accent on the "Buf" or on the "Puf," whatever--she kept drilling me as if I were an object in the box. And for her I was. A million-degree box, with an assistant putting cold towels on my back so I didn't pass out. I did jobs famous men who arrived drunk, and with famous men who arrived sober and were terrific and with whom I am friends today, like Bruce Willis, who was spectacular and funny and kind. -- After I was told that I got the part in Basic Instinct, I was asked to come in to meet with Paul Verhoeven, as well as some other people from the production company. I was so nervous and excited I could hardly hear. I met with Paul in the company's offices in Hollywood, then said hello to a few other people on the way down to fill out some paperwork and meet the line producer, an older, kind of dodgy man, in his messy office. He closed the door and sat down and said, "You were not our first choice, Karen. No, you were not even the second or the third. You were the thirteenth choice for this film." He continued to call me Karen all through the making and postproduction of the movie. I left that meeting so messed up that I got into my car in the parking lot, put on my rap music super-loud, and back into a semi three feet behind me. [image] -- Also, for the ten years of the on-fire piece of my career this caused me to skip all medical needs. Dislocated shoulder: suck it up. Root canal in my trailer with no novocaine at lunchtime: that was not a great one, I can say; I had that redone twice--and then had total jaw surgery to repair the damage from this absolutely stupid behavior. Bursting ovarian cyst: get some super-strong meds, and change it from a standing scene to a sitting scene. Broken foot from an overzealous stuntman: get a bigger boot for that foot, finish the show, and then get it rebroken and repaired after the show wraps. In other words, shut up and deal. There isn't room for babies in this biz, especially if I, as a woman, want to prove my mettle. -- Now that I look back on it, the hideousness of all of it, the unbearable pain of recovery, how I could be sitting on the couch and it would feel like someone had punched me in the face; my head would swivel, I would make a sound as if hit, and my face, only on that side, would suddenly turn bright red. Or I would get brutal pains on the top of my head and these inch-high lumps would come up, scattered over my scalp. Or my leg would feel like it was bleeding or wet, or burning. My fuse box was so messed up it was sending all kinds of weird signals all over the place. I was about to find out that I wouldn't be able to read for another two years or remember where I'd put down my teacup. But I was up and I was alive and I had a one-and-a-half-year-old baby boy who needed a mother. I didn't know how I would do it, but I knew I would. Stone's #metoo moments are like practice drills compared to her serious tests: growing up in a lower-middle class family of six in Pennsylvania, three miscarriages, losing custody of her adopted son and the removal of two benign tumors in her breasts, which led to her laying on one side, which led to blood pooling on that side of her brain which nearly killed her. A difficult rehabilitation and a search for inner peace was waiting for her next. Material rewards had been fleeting. Basic Instinct, her most popular film, is cited most often and her account of its opening weekend is one of the more amazing descriptions of the actor's life I've come across: -- When I played a serial killer in Basic Instinct I tapped into that rage. It was terrifying to look into the shadow self and to release it onto film for the world to see. To allow people to believe that I was "like that." Even more, to let myself know that I have or had that darkness within. I can say that it was and is the most freeing thing I have ever done. To engage my full self so very deeply and to free that dark angel. To know that I was angry--to know that I was so angry that I would have loved to stab Clarence to death--was incredibly freeing. Ultimately, it also let me know that I wasn't really the stabbing type. Letting myself process that rage was magnificent, and I think letting others feel that release was a bit therapeutic for the audience. I know it's not just me. The day Basic Instinct came out in theaters I hired a limo. Mimi and I started in Harlem and went to movie theaters all over NYC, from one side of town to the other, into the wee hours of the morning. We had bought two bowler derbies and wore our hair up inside and both of us wore our glasses. We watched about twenty minutes at each theater. Harlem was my favorite. People were yelling and screaming at the screen. Cheering my character on. We were having a ball, seeing the reactions all over town. We stopped in the Upper East and West Sides, Hell's Kitchen, all the way into the Bowery. We were running in and out of theaters at various points during the film and fleeing like thieves into the day and night. And the audiences went wild, they loved this movie! It was one of the best times. The next morning while we had a glorious, celebratory breakfast, the horrible reviews came out. [image] I found The Beauty of Living Twice compelling not by virtue of its writing, its study of the acting craft or even its potential for backstage intrigue. Stone admits that actresses have a reputation for "faking it"--which made her diagnosis nearly fatal and far more difficult than it should've been--but even taking that into account, I was moved by the strength this woman has summoned to complete the many trials of her life. She should not be alive. We shouldn't even know her name. Sharon Stone was born in 1958 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her father was a tool-and-die manufacturer. Her mother was a homemaker and briefly an accountant. Considered academically gifted as a child, Stone was awarded a creative writing scholarship to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. Crowned Miss Crawford County in 1975, Stone was drawn to the film industry and dropped out of college. Initially interested in directing, she moved to New York to pursue a modeling and acting career. She was plucked as an extra on Woody Allen's Stardust Memories for a larger, memorable but non-speaking role in the 1980 film. Stone spent a year in Zimbabwe and South Africa for her first film leading role in King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold. Supporting roles in two more action films led to a break playing a treacherous spy in the blockbuster Total Recall for director Paul Verhoeven. When as many as twelve leading ladies passed on the role of Catherine Trammell in Verhoeven's next film Basic Instinct, Stone fought for a screen test and won the part. Superstardom ensued. The prestige of her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress opposite Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in Casino led to Stone producing and starring in The Quick and the Dead, for which she plucked Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio out of obscurity to co-star with her. Stone has served as Global Campaign Chair for amfAR for twenty years, heightening awareness for AIDS research. In 2013, she was honored by the Nobel Peace Laureates with the Peace Summit Award for her work. Stone lives in San Francisco. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey ...more |
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1
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Jun 23, 2021
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Jun 28, 2021
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Mar 30, 2021
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Hardcover
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| B06XRSTBMN
| 4.19
| 71,316
| 1968
| Mar 21, 2017
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it was ok
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Joan Didion and Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. Publi
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Joan Didion and Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. Published in 1968, the book is a compilation of pieces commissioned mostly by the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, ranging from exposés on John Wayne or Michael Laski (founder of the Communist Party USA) to essays on herself to the title piece, which documents runaways in Haight-Ashbury in 1967. "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a wonderfully grimy long-read documenting the Flower Power era as it was turning ugly. I abandoned the book at the 70% mark, though. I don't feel that I was doing Didion's literary journalism any favors by binging one article after another. I wish I could've read these pieces as they were published in the 1960s, one per month. Taken together, I didn't feel they added up to much, except that every thinking person in every decade feels they're living in the end of times. Joan Didion was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California. Her father was an Army Air Corps officer and the family relocated often. Didion discovered reading at a young age and began writing at the age of five. In 1956, she received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her senior year, Didion won 1st place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and was awarded a job as a research assistant, working her way up to associate feature editor. She relocated to California in 1964 after marrying fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, with whom Didion wrote assignments for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post to pay the bills. Essays, novels, non-fiction, memoirs and screenplays (Dunne & Didion adapted the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of A Star is Born) would follow. Since her husband's death in 2003, Didion maintains residency in both Los Angeles and New York City. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende ...more |
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1
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May 31, 2021
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Jun 04, 2021
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Jan 02, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 0062908502
| 9780062908506
| 0062908502
| 4.40
| 2,651
| Nov 17, 2020
| Nov 17, 2020
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it was amazing
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"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed
"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused illustrates all too well what life imitating art means. Published in 2020, Melissa Maerz chronicles filmmaker Richard Linklater, a huge cast of then unknowns and crew members from L.A. and Austin as they dramatized the last day of the 1976 school year for a movie. In doing so, Maerz chronicles what high school is: friendships, rivalries, tests, confrontations with authority, drugs, alcohol, romances, breakups, music, clothes, classmates who graduate to enviable success, classmates who disappear, life, death and the passage of time. This book was poignant for me because Richard Linklater split his childhood with his mom in Huntsville, Texas and father in Houston in the 1970s and I grew up in Houston in the 1980s. When Dazed and Confused was being shot in Austin in the summer of 1992, I'd just finished my freshman year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to magically visit the set of a classic movie as it was being created but here was a seminal film that literally shot around the corner from me at a time where I might've actually been hired to work on it. Part of me thinks I'm way too introverted to run cable and made better use of my time reading and writing, while another part of me wishes for a do-over. This book was that do-over. -- Gary Price: Austin was so cheap. Everybody I knew at the time was living in a house where it was like $300, total--to rent the entire house! That's why Austin had so many musicians and artists. It has the University of Texas, which elevates the intellectual pursuits, but it's still a lazy place, because you don't have to make money to live there. People said Stevie Ray Vaughan could play like that because he only had to pay $60 a month in rent. How could he not come up with great songs when he could just play guitar all day and not work? [image] -- Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, "You're going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You're going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?" And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time. -- Marisa Ribisi: In film, it's always like, "What's your big moment? What's the catalyst? What's it about?" And I think Rick was like, "It's not about anything. It's about people existing." If you look at Dazed and Confused, there was the A-story, which is, "Is Pink gonna take the pledge with the football team?" But really, they're just hanging out. How do you pitch that film? "It's the 1970s, it's the bicentennial, the music is gonna be great"? "Here, let me give you millions of dollars!" -- Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn't feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, "Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!" And you're just like, "Huh?" It didn't feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That's the thing that's so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it. [image] - Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren't the '70s sexist? Aren't we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. The pitting against. It's constant and it's catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to interesting and human? -- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we're going to sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you're gonna try to break Wooderson down, you're already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve--yeah, he doesn't fit in that. He's on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance. Wooderson is not the kind of guy who's gonna get conscious of, "Oh, this is creepy." He's just the kind of guy that goes, "I'm sorry you see it that way. Whatever's going on in your life, I hope you get through it." I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand. -- Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times-type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie. [image] -- Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I'm one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that's what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren't. This set a template that I've gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It's really not something you can control--it's out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn't spelled out. -- Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, "I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn't realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we're going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow." That's when I started to realize, this could be big. -- Mark Duplass: There's this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you're creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn't exist. It's the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now. [image] Melissa Maerz was a founding editor of Vulture (the website of New York Magazine) and has served stints as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone. One of the things I loved about how she compiled this book was letting subjects respond to someone else's versions of events, which don't always correlate when people with egos who enjoyed having a good time try to recall things that happened 25 years ago. An entire chapter is devoted to the legend surrounding the discovery of Matthew McConaughey (at a bar atop the Hyatt Regency in Austin.) See Dazed and Confused if you haven't already. Buy this book if you have. [image] ...more |
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Dec 08, 2020
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| B0010SKSTO
| 3.91
| 31,733
| Apr 15, 2008
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liked it
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The amateur detective in the novel I'm writing is a keen observer, particularly of body language, so I was excited when my new Goodreads friend Tharin
The amateur detective in the novel I'm writing is a keen observer, particularly of body language, so I was excited when my new Goodreads friend Tharindu Dissanayake reviewed What Every Body Is Saying: An FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People. Published in 2008, the book is both wet and dry, with photos of author Joe Navarro and/or his administrative assistant Ashlee Castle demonstrating gestures or expressions and plenty of anecdotes from Navarro's career as a T-Man, but also lots of references which made the book an academic read. It's not as absorbing as Mary Roach but fans of her books might enjoy this. Here are a few of the facts I stole: -- Nonverbal behaviors comprise approximately 60 to 65 percent of all interpersonal communication and, during lovemaking, can constitute 100 percent of communication between partners. -- When women pacify using the neck, they often do so by covering or touching their suprasternal notch with their hand. The suprasternal notch is the hollow area between the Adam's apple and the breastbone that is sometimes referred to as the neck dimple. When a woman touches this part of her neck and/or covers it with her hand, it is typically because she feels distressed, threatened, uncomfortable, insecure or fearful. This is a relatively significant behavioral clue that can be used to detect, among other things, the discomfort experienced when a person is lying or concealing important information. -- When reading body language, most individuals start their observation at the top of a person (the face) and work their way down, despite the fact that the face is the one part of the body that is most often used to bluff and conceal true sentiments. My approach is the exact opposite. Having conducted thousands of interviews for the FBI, I learned to concentrate on the suspect's feet and legs first, moving upward in observations until I read the face last. When it comes to honesty, truthfulness decreases as we move from the feet to the head. -- Did you ever wonder why you get an upset stomach if there is an argument at the dinner table? When you are upset, your digestive system no longer has as much blood as it needs for proper digestion. Just as your limbic system's freeze, flight or fight response shunts blood away from the skin, it likewise diverts blood from your digestive system, sending blood to your heart and limb muscles (especially the legs) to prepare for your escape. The upset stomach you feel is a symptom of limbic arousal. The next time an argument ensues during a meal, you will recognize the limbic response of distress. Along these lines, it is interesting to note how many people vomit after experiencing a traumatic event. In essence, during emergencies the body is saying that there is no time for digestion; the reaction is to lighten the load and prepare for escape or physical conflict. -- When we are truly relaxed and comfortable, facial muscles relax and the head will tilt to the side, exposing our most vulnerable area, the neck. This is a high-comfort display--often seen during courtship--that is nearly impossible to mimic when we are uncomfortable, tense, suspicious, or threatened. -- As a law enforcement officer, if I encounter a person on the street looking down, his feet in the ready or "pugilistic position," with his nose flaring, I suspect that he is probably preparing to do one of three things: argue, run or fight. Nasal wing dilation is something you should always be watching for if you are around someone who might have reason either to attack or run away from you. It is just one of many suspicious behaviors we should teach our children to watch for. That way they will be more aware when people are becoming dangerous, especially at school or on playgrounds. -- The truth is that identifying deceit is so difficult that repeated studies begun in the 1980s show that most of us--including judges, attorneys, clinicians, police officers, FBI agents, politicians, teachers, mothers, fathers and spouses--are not better than chance (fifty-fifty) when it comes to detecting deception. Even those who are truly gifted at detecting deception (probably less than 1 percent of the general population) seldom are right more than 60 percent of the time. Consider the countless jurors who must determine honesty or dishonesty, guilt or innocence, based on what they think are deceptive behaviors. Unfortunately, those behaviors most often mistaken for dishonesty are primarily manifestations of stress, not deception. That's why I live by the motto taught to me by those who know that there is no single behavior that is indicative of deception--not one. Navarro frequently reminds the reader that there is no short cut (or what's come to be referred to as a "hack") to detecting a lie and stress can often produce these various tells rather than deception. It makes for an engaging read, though. Like most great writers, Quentin Tarantino knew the significance of body language in the first script he wrote, True Romance, which was directed by Tony Scott and features a classic scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. I was 20 years old when I saw this scene in a theater and without any hype around Tarantino at that time, was completely blown away by it. True Romance - The Sicilian Scene ...more |
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Nov 22, 2020
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Dec 03, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525561935
| 9780525561934
| 0525561935
| 3.55
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| Aug 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
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really liked it
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but all the books I can get my hands on about Los Angeles. Published in 20
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but all the books I can get my hands on about Los Angeles. Published in 2020, City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimainged by Paul Lunenfeld was pretty good. Neither definitive nor voluminous, I did learn a lot about the city I didn't know. By virtue of most everyone being sealed inside a car, this metropolis holds secrets that cities with pedestrian traffic give up to anyone with a curious nature as they stroll by landmarks. Lunenfeld has a meandering writing style that I actually grew fond of as he somehow segueways from Gidget to Austrian emigrees. I Often Take Out Of Town Guests Here -- Like so many drawn to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, William Mulholland came in search of a new world, and so he created one. The place that he made possible is crowned by a road that snakes atop the Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills. Just above the Hollywood Bowl, there's a vantage point from which, on a clear day, Hollywood, downtown, the Valley, the surrounding mountains, and even the Pacific Ocean are all visible simultaneously--one of the few places where Los Angeles coheres as a whole. The road is appropriately named Mulholland Drive, and when you look out from that point, you see, manifested in the city's present, the future toward which its greatest engineer pointed in the past. I'd Bet She Didn't Really Write This -- But people with brains (often from New York) kept streaming west regardless. In the thirties, Dorothy Parker traded Manhattan's legendary Algonquin Round Table for Hollywood's writers' table, snagging two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting along the way to ever-greater consumption of alcohol and a place on the blacklist for her leftist politics. Parker is reputed to have dismissed her new hometown of LA as "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city," a nasty little dig that resonated for generations with Angelenos in her wake. Biopic Please -- Unlike the beach bunnies who were already hopping along the shore, Kathy decided that she wanted to join the men in the water and brought sandwiches with her to trade for time on their boards. The "boys" all had nicknames--from the Big Kahuna to Tubesteak to Da Cat (more on him later). Kathy--just under five feet tall and ninety-five pounds when wet--was a girl and, evidently to the rest of the surfers, midget-sized: hence, Girl-Midget or Gidget, a fusion that reeks of both schoolyard taunts and what Sigmund Freud called "condensation." Kathy/Gidget bought a board and taught herself to surf. Biopic Please II -- As much as demographics changed, so too, did the entertainments. With jobs aplenty, production lines running day and night, and soldiers, sailors, and airmen on three-day leaves, there was money in people's pockets, and they wanted to spend it on more than movies and malteds. That's where Central Avenue came in. Central, also known as the Stem, had been the heart of black LA since the 1920s, and the Dunbar Hotel had been the beating muscle of that heart. African Americans were excluded from most hotels in Los Angeles, and from all the better ones. A black entrepreneur, John Somerville, decided to build an establishment to surpass any other that catered to African Americans. Riot on the Strip -- On the Strip, the ultimate answer is a poisonous combination of money, real estate and taste. The Riot on Sunset Strip was a conflict ignited by shifting demographics and economics, pitting the new scensters against the Strip's established clientele. Journalist Kirk Silsbee reminisced about the moment of transition in the midsixties: "The Old School Hollywood Supper Clubs--Ciro's, the Mocambo, the Trocadero, the Moulin Rouge--had a steep profit margin that they had to maintain. They relied on the patronage of moneyed Hollywood that could pay for dinner and a show every night. Kids couldn't do that. They could go to Ben Frank's or Canter's or The Fifth Estate and nurse a cup of coffee all night long or hang out in the parking lot." Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story Should've Been This: -- Just as diet didn't save Father Yod from the force of gravity, food alone didn't remake Lee's body. That metamorphosis took working out with a group of American marital artists, mostly vets, that Lee had met in Long Beach, among them a marine vet and kickboxing champion named Joe Lewis; a former soldier, Mike "The Animal" Stone; and a former airman named Chuck Norris, who went on to fame in film, television and Internet memes, but only after filming a fight with his old friend Lee at the conclusion of The Way of the Dragon, considered one of the great battles in the history of marital arts films. What Lee took from them were bodybuilding techniques that allowed him to add muscle and definition to his body, not only focusing on his biceps and chest but also strengthening and defining the connective tissue, tendons and ligaments. Alien, Time Traveler or Robot? -- Three of the central themes of speculative media--time travel, interstellar voyaging, and lifelike robots--are the least likely aspects of the genre to ever "come true." How these themes intersect in one of the most iconic films ever made about a Los Angeles that doesn't exist demonstrates the usefulness of speculative thinking about the city. The film centers o a policeman from a squad of "blade runners" who track down runaway lifelike androids called "replicants" in order to "retire" them, an act indistinguishable in physical and moral terms from murder. The three impossibles of speculative fiction were all present. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 24, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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Aug 23, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0544648943
| 9780544648944
| 0544648943
| 3.88
| 1,590
| Aug 08, 2017
| Aug 08, 2017
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it was amazing
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian wr
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for looks at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in popular culture. While I'd never followed the reviews of Carina Chocano during her tenure at the Los Angeles Times from 2003-2008, like Manohla Dargis--whose departure to the New York Times slid Chocano over from TV to film--Chocano was a trustworthy voice from my generation, thoughtful, analytical and enjoyable to read. Chocano's memoir You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages mixes stories of her childhood (she was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1968 and moved to New Jersey at the age of 5 when her father, a marketing executive for a pharmaceutical company, was transferred to New York), school days, marriage and motherhood (she gave birth to a daughter the year she was laid off from the Times) with criticism of how women are portrayed in a dozen or so pop culture institutions. Nearly every print publication be it ink or electronic has someone like Chocano reviewing film and TV daily. What makes her book special is how much I realized I had in common with her beyond her impressions of Ghostbusters 2016 (good but not great summer movie). Like me, Chocano grew up in the suburbs in the '70s and '80s, went to school, dated and all the while absorbed many of the same magazines, books and movies that I did. Her book is sharp, creative, passionate and candid. She lays it all out there. She taught me a great deal about how women are misrepresented in film. Even better, she's often very funny. On discovering Katharine Hepburn when she was 12 years old: Before watching The Philadelphia Story, it had never occurred to me that femininity and femaleness were not one and the same thing. I'd dutifully absorbed the lessons embedded in movies, TV shows, ads, magazines, commercials, and cartoons. The frillier, flightier, wilier, sweeter, gentler, kinder, bitchier, more nurturing, scarier, more insecure, more insincere a character was, the more of a "girl" she was. I'd learned to rank female characters by prettiness. Little girls like to claim their heroines' beauty as their own. It's like picking a team, though it's unclear what's being won. The Philadelphia Story marked the first time I remember encountering the idea that this ephemeral but familiar thing I'd recognized all my life as the feminine ideal might be not just distinct from but also possibly oppressive to women. It came as a shock. Here was Tracy, a heroine--a bride, no less--and she was different. She was experienced. She had learned from her youthful mistakes and was making deliberate choices. She had agency. She had a horse. (Not that this was germane, but I really loved horses.) She was comfortable in her own skin, secure, and she believed in herself. She radiated confidence of a kind I'd never seen before in a movie heroine. It wasn't the kind of confidence you usually saw in movie stars. It wasn't just that she was secure in her sexiness. On the contrary, she didn't seem to think about her sexiness at all. What made her attractive was that she acted like a person, not a girl. I did think it was strange to be encountering this in 1980, given that The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940. [image] On revisiting a movie she was obsessed with at 15: Only now, decades later, do I see Flashdance for what it was: a fantasy of self-creation ungrounded in political, material, or economic reality. It was a feature length music video hawking the individualist, bootstrapping Reagan-era fantasy. It said you can do anything (in your imagination). All it takes to lift yourself off the lowest social rung and be borne aloft on wings of stardom and true love is a big dream, a flashy style, a psychotic belief in yourself, and a willingness to sleep with your boss. You just have to want it. You can do it! Girl power! Dream on, sister! And hey, if it doesn't work out, remember you have only yourself to blame. Maybe you weren't good enough, did you ever consider that? Here are some tips for self-improvement. Flashdance taught us that stripping was cool and a great way to put yourself through school. It taught us that the window to success is open for a very short time. Without Nick, Alex would have curdled into something monstrous in no time. [image] I must pause to give Chocano credit for some awesome chapter titles: A Modest Proposal for More Backstabbing in Preschool The Kick-Ass The Bronze Statue of the Virgin Slut Ice Queen Bitch Goddess You Play the Girl was already good but when Chocano turned her lens on the Seth Rogen-Katherine Heigl comedy Knocked Up, which she saw while trying to have a baby, her memoir really took off for me. The problem with Knocked Up wasn't that it was full of moments that made it more than a little bit sexist, even though it was. The problem was that it presented an adolescent boy's perspective of what it means to be an adult woman in a world that has not yet come to terms with the idea of women as autonomous subjects. The problem was that it reveled in its hero's unearned advantage in this world while at the same time refusing to acknowledge what it's like on the other side. The movie refused to so much as utter the word abortion. (It makes somebody say "smashmorshun" instead.) Knocked Up wasn't interested in Alison's life or in her experience or in her options; it was the life stages of a woman as they are seen in fairy tales: child, maiden (hot chick), mother, and crone. Alison was an incubator, not only for her baby but for Ben's maturity. The trouble wasn't only Knocked Up, of course. This take on gender relations circa 2007 was the only perspective anyone got. It was the most suffocating dude-bro imperialism; patriarchy rebranded as "fratiarchy." Watching it, I felt the way I imagine Khrushchev must have felt as Nixon tried to undermine his self-esteem with a tour of the modern American kitchen. Khrushchev was, like, we have kitchens in Russia, too, you know ... But nobody listened. I'm listening and I'd like to hope that content creators either have a jewel like Chocano reading their work before it's shipped worldwide, or has her terrific book on their shelf. [image] ...more |
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Apr 21, 2023
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May 27, 2023
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Dec 15, 2022
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really liked it
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Dec 18, 2022
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it was amazing
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Jan 19, 2023
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really liked it
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Oct 31, 2022
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Sep 06, 2022
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it was amazing
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May 06, 2022
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Apr 26, 2022
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really liked it
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May 28, 2022
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really liked it
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Apr 28, 2022
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it was ok
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Apr 13, 2022
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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it was amazing
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Aug 30, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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Oct 13, 2021
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May 07, 2021
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it was ok
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it was amazing
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Dec 16, 2020
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Dec 08, 2020
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Dec 03, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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Aug 23, 2020
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it was amazing
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Jul 30, 2020
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Jul 16, 2020
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