Princess Bookworm

Where'd She Go?

2009-11-09T01:43:00.000-08:00

Anyone out there? *taps microphone* I know, I know, it's been forever and ever since I've posted here. I got so busy with school and work, and by the time things had calmed down, the way I was interacting with the internet had changed completely.

Well, I just started a new, very different kind of blog. It still has recommendations, but it's MUCH less wordy, more like an annotated catalog of Things I Love on the Internet than a collection of essays.

If you're at all interested in that (or would just like to come over and say "Hi!"), I'm at Hyperbole is the Best Thing Ever.

In Praise of Paul Gross

2008-09-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Who is Paul Gross? He's the most talented and appealing actor you've never heard of. He lives and works mainly in Canada, and is probably most famous in the US for his portrayal of a displaced Mountie--Benton Fraser--on the short-lived, but charming television show, Due South. You might also have seen him in the original television mini-series of Tales of the City, or (and this one's my personal favorite) as a frazzled and possibly crazy theater director in Slings & Arrows. Gross is also a writer, director, producer and musician. He is a passionate and articulate defender for arts funding in Canada.

Now, why should you care?

Let's get the shallow part out of the way first: the man is beautiful. There's no point in even disputing that. He's got the sort of old-fashioned movie-star looks you just don't see very often. Say, once in a generation. And he's not a plastic doll, either. He has the charisma to match. It radiates off of him in a way that is frankly almost ridiculous in its intensity. I once watched a double feature of him and then a Cary Grant movie. No joke: Cary Grant lost that round.

Gross is not just a pretty face. Far from it. He's a talented actor with the almost preternatural ability to create a complex, seemingly-whole new person for each of the parts he plays. As I said before, my favorite role of his is as Geoffrey Tennant in the absolutely outstanding series, Slings & Arrows. Geoffrey is brilliant, unstable and hilariously temperamental, with a core of passionate integrity that is almost maddening, but ultimately lovable. Watch him here, as he attempts to coach one of his actors in a production of Hamlet. This may very well be my favorite moment in all of television. Gross is Ophelia for a moment. It's uncanny.

Then there's the do-gooder Mountie of Due South, a character that could so easily have been a soulless caricature. In Gross's capable hands, he's anything but.

This week, Mr. Gross's newest project, Passchendaele, which he wrote, produced, directed and stars in, was the opening night film for the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

Passchendaele is a love story centered around the WWI battle that claimed the lives of 15,000 Canadians, an event that played a major role in shaping the Canadian national identity. With a $20-million-dollar budget, the film is one of the most expensive ever made in Canada. Just to give you some perspective on what that really means: it's an epic war movie on the scale of Saving Private Ryan, made for the price of something like Sideways. Looks pretty amazing, yes?

It may be a while before Passchendaele gets released in the United States, so if I've piqued your interest at all, the other things I've mentioned are available on DVD. I also highly recommend Wilby Wonderful. Written by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, it's about a day in the life of a small island town. The cast is uniformly outstanding, and includes a young(er) Ellen Page.

Edited to add this video clip of Mr. Gross speaking eloquently about his new film, and looking fantastic while he does it.

Shortbus (2006)

2006-11-01T12:12:00.000-08:00

Directed by John Cameron Mitchell

This has been a great fall movie season. Wonderful films like The Departed, Half Nelson and The Illusionist all piled one on top of the other like great, unexpected gifts, but the greatest miracle of the year so far has been John Cameron Mitchell’s sad, joyful, hilarious and chaotic film, Shortbus.

Mitchell is a bonafide American genius, quite deservedly famous for his freewheeling, sentimental rock opera, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This second film is mainly notorious for containing a lot of graphic, un-simulated sex. The film follows the stories of several loosely connected New Yorkers, all dealing with trials in love and sex and loneliness and connection. They all come together at a salon/sex-club called Shortbus, which is presided over by the beautiful Justin Bond. Though Mitchell called it his “sex movie” in the casting ads he ran in industry papers a few years ago, the film is most emphatically not pornography (whatever the hell that means, anyway). Instead, the sex is used to explore the way we connect—or fail to connect—with one another. It’s played for sweetness, for grief, for beauty, and frequently for slapstick hilarity, but not really for prurient interest.

Many reviewers have gone on at length about how not-erotic Shortbus is, and in a sense, I just now agreed with them. At the same time, I really don’t. Just because the film isn’t pornographic (again, whatever the hell that means), doesn’t mean it isn’t sexy. It is deliriously sexy, but maybe not in the ways you would expect. It lives in hundreds of small details. The sexy is in a close-up of the fingers of the Statue of Liberty as Anita O’Day croons “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby,” and in the swoop of the camera over a colorful, fairy-tale version of New York. It’s in the look of warm sympathy a beautiful girl gives Sook-Yin Lee’s character as Lee stares longingly at a tangle of fun from the outside, and in the cheerfully unselfconscious way that Jay Brennan’s character calls out, “Switch!” during a threesome. It is in lots of sweet kisses, and in the awkward-beautiful tangle of knees and elbows and breasts and cocks that is the Sex-not-Bombs room of Shortbus. It is in the idiosyncratic beauty of each of the actors, and it is in every second of screen time for the scorching-hot Justin Bond. (That man’s mouth is clearly one of the seven wonders, and he’s funny as hell on top of it all.) And the sexy is in the deliriously hopeful tone of the movie, every frame trumpeting the joys of freedom and courage and difference.

Yet for all that, the film isn’t just about sex, nor is it entirely joyful. Shortbus doesn’t bother to hide the fact that—all too often—living is a struggle. The movie and its characters are all too aware that we are each trapped, alone inside our separate skins. Sex can be a way to get close to breaching that wall, but in the end, that barrier will never come completely down. Shortbus is full of folks attempting to make that connection against the odds, sometimes succeeding beautifully, sometimes failing painfully.

But I am making this film sound like an art-house tone poem of boredom, when it really is quite the opposite. It is very snappily paced for an ensemble piece, and there is enough uncertainty in each of the entwined plots to keep you curious about the outcomes right up to the very end. There isn’t a moment when the film seems to drag or slow, or when you just wish it would hurry up and end. And it is funny, my god! There are so many fantastic visual jokes in the film that the audience I saw it with was laughing over a good quarter of the dialogue. I had to see it twice just to get some of the plot points. Believe me, that was no hardship. It’s a rollercoaster whirlwind of a good time, and would be worth it just for the entertainment value, but it has a real heart, and a hopeful vision for us humans, and both times I saw it, I left the theater feeling as if the world had been saved for just one more day.

Bleak House (2005)

2006-03-10T13:31:00.000-08:00

Directors: Justin Chadwick& Susanna White
Writing credits: Andrew Davies & Charles Dickens (novel)

I grew up on public television. My parents, being hippies and socialists, didn’t have a TV when I was very young, but even after they did, us kids were allowed to watch only a very small number of things: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at Easter, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ at Christmas, Sesame Street, the Muppets, Nova and Masterpiece Theater were the only things I recall watching. I loved Masterpiece Theater almost in spite of itself, because—with a few notable exceptions—it was like literature with all the juice sucked out of it. Watching a word-perfect adaptation—one with every costume, bonnet-ribbon, drinking glass, chair and buckle flawlessly recreated to period—that is at the same time absolutely without a discernable pulse, or any discernable passion can be an almost unbearably frustrating experience. If they got the hairdo right, you wonder, and the whiskers, and the shoes, why, oh, why can they not feel what the book is ABOUT, for crying out loud?

Well, thank the merciful heavens for Andrew Davies. He’s actually been writing screen adaptations of books for the BBC since before I was born, and he seems to be getting better all the time. He is currently famous for ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ and for the 1995 BBC version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ starring Colin Firth, but he is also the writer for several of my very favorite BBC productions over the years, including ‘Middlemarch’, ‘Tipping the Velvet’, and now this wondrous, amazing ‘Bleak House.’ He is one of very few literary adapters who are respectful to, but don’t seem at all stifled by the presence of the original work, and he has been blessed with many excellent directors and actors.

In the case of ‘Bleak House,’ which was released on DVD last week, his adaptation managed to acquire the stunning Gillian Anderson, perfectly cast as the coldly mysterious Lady Dedlock, Charles Dance for the role of the cunningly sinister Mr. Tulkinghorn, and wonder of wonders, a young actress named Anna Maxwell Martin, who is able to play one of Dickens’ treacly good-girl characters in such a way that she seems like a real—and profoundly loveable—person. This last is possibly the most unlikely miracle in BBC history. Dickens’ good girls are almost impossibly good, and often without other discernable qualities. The roles don’t leave much for actresses to work with, and frequently reduce them to pretty faces with candy-fluff lines. Not so here. Martin’s Esther Summerson is forthright, always kind, soft-spoken and completely genuine. Her round face, slightly crooked smile, and perfectly clear blue eyes express everything her character feels in the most subtle and heart-wrenching way. You ache for her troubles and rejoice in her good fortune, as if she was the best sister you never had. If there weren’t already a thousand excellent reasons to love this ‘Bleak House,’ she would be more than enough all on her own.

Fortunately for her, Martin doesn’t have the slightest need to carry this picture. It does not require a crutch. It has all of those pitch-perfect details that are the signature of a true BBC production, but none of the stiltedness. Davies and the directors juggle the dozens of characters and story lines in a lively and blessedly comprehensible way, and they never lose sight of the emotional consequences of the action. This ‘Bleak House’ has a beating heart, not a metronome, at its center. And, though I must admit that I have never read the book, and therefore was able to be surprised at every turn, I do know that real Dickens fans were just as excited about it as I was. Not being a Dickens fan myself, I am ashamed to admit that I might actually prefer the movie version. The man did like to take the long way around the barn, as they say, and Davies prefers to go straight to the heart of the matter. Yes, Dad, I know I’m a philistine, but it’s true.

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

2006-01-29T23:43:00.000-08:00

By Jeff Chang

This is my week for hip-hop. The release of ‘Hustle & Flow’ on video just happened to come on the heels of the paperback release of this outstanding, wide-ranging history of hip-hop and of the social conditions that led to it. This music may very well be the significant artistic and cultural innovation of my generation, and it would be an exaggeration to say that I was unaware of some of its creation myths. How could I remain completely ignorant? Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and N.W.A. effectively ruled the airwaves (and hallways) when I was a kid, but really, I was too young, and too far removed from the birthplace to see the full picture. I am grateful that I have the chance to catch up on what I missed, and that Jeff Chang has so carefully placed the cultural manifestation of rap in to its rightful, and still relevant, sociological and political context.

Chang is clearly passionate about the music, and about the people involved with its creation, and his prose fairly rings with his perfectly justified rage at the conditions under which hip-hop flourished. The book, in addition to being so well-paced and so packed with insider stories that one races through it as if it were a mystery novel, is a bracing (and infuriating) reminder that the terrible situation in the “inner city” did not happen merely by accident. We all know part of the story, and anyone living in a big city has seen the ravages of it firsthand: in the late 60s and early 70s, the assassination or imprisonment of every potential or actual leader for the black community dovetailed synergistically with deindustrialization and other factors to exacerbate poverty and hopelessness in poor urban neighborhoods like the Bronx. When crime in these areas quite understandably began to escalate, city, state and federal government in many places responded to the problem with a policy bearing the euphemistic moniker of “benign neglect.” Another way of putting it is that cities like New York began to pull essential infrastructure and social services out of these neighborhoods that needed them so desperately, and left those who couldn’t afford to move away to soldier on without the support one would optimistically suppose to be universal in a “First World” country.

With a miraculous alchemy common to folk arts everywhere, this lead-bullet of a situation was the cradle for what would become the biggest, most lucrative and most controversial art of my generation. It is this alchemy that ‘Can’t Stop Won’t Stop’ attempts to capture. What is amazing about Chang’s book is his ability to synthesize the many disparate and complex elements in to a heart pounding, race-to-the-finish narrative. Weaving policy statements from politicians, first-hand accounts gleaned from hundreds of personal interviews and quotes taken from essays by leading scholars with observations about market forces, international politics and cultural heritage, he has managed to create a document that is rich with detail, and confounding in its scope. I don’t want to ruin his game, so I won’t even try to give any further synopsis. It’s a task that would be nearly impossible anyway. After taking us on this roller-coaster, Chang closes the book with several riffs on a quote from William Wimsatt, made in the wake of the increased commercialization and co-optation of hip-hop: “Young people are noticing that the only thing that can’t be bought, sold, co-opted or marketed anymore is substantive political organizing and dissent.”[1] Amen to that. I’ll see you there…but first read this book.

To purchase, go here:

For another viewpoint on ‘Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,’ go here:

[1] William Upski Wamsatt, “State of the Movement,” in Future 500: Youth Organizing and Activism in the United States, comp. Jee Kim, Mathilda de Rios, Pablo Caraballo, Manuela Arciniegas, Ibrahim Abdul-Martin and Kofi Taha (New Orleans, LA : Subway and Elevated, 2002).

Hustle & Flow (2005)

2006-01-21T11:29:00.000-08:00

Craig Brewer, Director

I watch a lot of movies. Some are great, some are awful; many are right smack in between the two states. Every once in a while there will come along a film that is delightfully entertaining, but at the same time manages to shake me up and turn my preconceptions out on their ears. This year, I thought that movie would be ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ but as interesting as that film may have been, ‘Hustle & Flow is the revolution.

The film follows a small-time pimp and drug dealer named DJay (played by the almost supernaturally seductive Terrence Howard), as well as his “girls”--a softly timid and very pregnant woman named Shug and a hard-as-nails white girl festooned with braided extensions named Nola. DJay is in the middle of a crisis about his life, and about the place to which his choices (and options) have led him. If you have seen even the tiniest preview of the film, you will know that he eventually finds a way to express his life through music, specifically hard-core Memphis-style rap.

Now, reading those words, you may think you know what to expect from this film. What a movie cliché these things have become: pimps, white-trash hookers, poor black towns, crisis and easy redemption. And the film does serve those stereotypes up to you, but it forces your eye to rest on them long enough that you begin to see more than your own tired notions. The characters feel real, complicated and singular, with plenty of inner darkness and also plenty of hidden sweet spots. The film isn’t in the business of judging them, either, or of creating tidy moralistic answers to their problems.

Like all great movies, ‘Hustle & Flow’ isn’t particularly easy on the viewer. It leaves you with plenty of unanswered questions, and a little bit of discomfort. The story is deceptively simple, and it is only when you walk away that you find yourself working over the dilemmas presented by it. The actors and director conspire to leave a little mystery behind every connection, every interaction. Contained within this little movie is a whole string of prayer beads worth of thought-problems.

How the film manages to slip these thorns in to something so exhilarating is anyone’s guess, but it does. Just in case you don’t like worrying over questions, you can walk out of this movie and take only the thrill: from watching this band of misfits create real music, from watching them triumph in way that feels absolutely possible, from listening to some great Memphis sound. And that should be enough for anyone.

In Praise of Stephanie Zacharek

2005-08-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

I love the e-mag, Salon.com. It may be a paid service, but it is well worth the pittance I pay for it. The writing is consistently high-quality, the politics are right up my alley, and it offers lots of goodies to "premium" subscribers. That's all nice, but by far the greatest treasure Salon has at its disposal is its almost-painfully-excellent movie reviewer, Stephanie Zacharek.

If there is a living heir to Pauline Kael, this girl is it. Yes, her writing is lively and engaging, yes, she seems to have excellent taste as far as I can tell, but much, much more than that, she just "gets" it. She is hooked in to what really makes movies grab us, what makes them funny, and how tiny, little things can make the difference between good ones and bad ones, and even more so, good ones and great ones.

And she has her finger on the pulse of what makes movies, and their stars, sexy or mysteriously interesting. A recent piece she wrote on Tony Leung (you might remember him from "Hero" but in any case, run out right now and rent "Infernal Affairs," "Chungking Express" and "In the Mood for Love" if you haven't already), didn't say a single thing about him that I would ever have thought up on my own, but perfectly captured the ways in which I (and probably thousands of others) have been thoroughly seduced by him.

I think the reason Ms. Zacharek can do this so easily is that she's not playing around. She really IS seduced by films, by actors, by the little things about them. You can feel in her writing that she really loves the movies, wants them to be better, wants to trumpet the joys of those few really great ones, and to appreciate the smaller pleasures of the simply fun ones. Reading her essays gives me a contact high. I come away feeling exhilarated, even when the review is negative. I can't really explain it any better than that, and anyway, you'll just have to see for yourself.

Firefly (TV, 2002)

2005-06-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

Creator, Joss Whedon

I don’t actually watch television, in part because the only channels we get in the basement are 4 and 5, and in part because even two minutes of commercial are usually enough to make me want smash in the screen with a baseball bat. What used to be my three favorite TV shows are all ones that I discovered before my baseball-bat tendency really made itself felt. Each of my shows has since been cancelled or cannibalized, and these days I just stay out of the fray.

Well, thanks to my slightly more tolerant friends, I now have a new series to love beyond all reason. Though, to be fair, I am not sure I would have heard of ‘Firefly’ if’n I had been watching the TV day and night during the period of time that it was on. The poor show was moved around, aired out of order, cancelled repeatedly, and finally abandoned by the network after only 11 episodes. I encountered it three years after that, on a DVD set that includes three never-aired episodes, and numerous cast and crew commentaries. I was hooked from the first episode.

In point of fact, I haven’t fallen that hard, that fast for a piece of filmed entertainment since the “she’s dead, wrapped in plastic” scene from the ‘Twin Peaks’ pilot. I have loved science fiction since I discovered its existence at the age of eight, and ‘Firefly’ is the show that I had—unbeknownst to myself—been waiting for all that time. It reminded me almost immediately of the best things about C.J. Cherryh’s ‘Downbelow Station,’ Joan D. Vinge’s ‘Catspaw,’ Daniel Keys Moran’s ‘The Long Run’ and dozens of other good books.

The flickering (and perhaps unintentional) callbacks to other science fiction worlds lend ‘Firefly’ a curious depth and sense of reality, but the show is not really derivative of any of them. Joss Whedon has done several things to make it feel fresh and new. He has cleverly equated the borders of settled space 500 years in our future with the American West circa the mid 19th century, without introducing any overtly cheesy “cowboy” motifs. His characters see themselves as outlaws, and most of them speak with a careful, formalized twang that is both Western and completely new. The actors’ costumes are a lived-in mix of Earth cultures, and their speech is interspersed with creative exclamations in Mandarin Chinese. There are nine main characters, and it is their shifting relationships that really make the thing shine. Each episode has the requisite sci-fi adventure, but even the most mundane of capers is enlivened by extra helpings of wit, emotion and intrigue, and is graced by the excellent acting of the extraordinarily talented cast. It is, in other words, a gem of a cancelled show, and well worth the DVD rental price.

And if you do end up loving the half-season as much as I did, Joss has already completed a full-length feature continuation. It will be released in theatres on September 30, 2005. (I’ve actually seen it already, but am reserving my comments until closer to the release date. I will say that I LOVED it!)

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

2005-06-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

Doug Liman, Director

I saw two movies in the theater this week: Batman Begins and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. One of these films was a perfect example of what good can come of a small movie when it is in the hands of a director who has a light touch, intelligence and a sense of humor. The other one was a perfect example of what I like to call the poke-me-in-the-eye-with-a-sharp-stick school of moviemaking. What do these films have in common? Absolutely nothing except for the fact that they were, thankfully, both playing at the Majestic Bay in Ballard last night, so that when it became clear after 20 minutes that Batman was never going to give me any more pleasure than a stick in the eye, I was able to sneak out and head next door just in time to catch almost all of my favorite scenes from Mr. & Mrs. Smith again.

Yes, that’s right folks, the unthinkable has happened: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s little shoot-‘em-up of a romantic comedy has become my new summer favorite. Last night was the third time I watched the two most beautiful people in the world seethe at one another over the barrels of machine guns, and banter deliciously about the “web of lies” that was their marriage. It definitely won’t be the last.

As I said, this is a small movie. There isn’t anything spectacular about it; it does not attempt grandeur of any kind. This is precisely why it wins. It is a domestic comedy, with the action working as an excellent and strangely cathartic metaphor for purely domestic friction. It isn’t a metaphor that is pushed on the viewer in any way; there is no sturm und drang in this film, only small moments of near-perfect pleasure. The numerous little jokes and exhilarating action scenes are placed carefully on top of one another, the actors convey just enough real emotion to allow you to believe in their marriage, and everything is wrapped up just soon enough to let you leave the theater wanting more. To my mind, it is a perfect summer movie: beautiful, beautiful people, just enough touch of reality to keep you with them, and some over-the-top, adrenaline-rush-producing fun thrown in for spice. Take that, Batman! You can keep your sharp stick…

PS. For a detailed review that perfectly conveys exactly what is so great about Mr. & Mrs. Smith, please go here.

In Praise of Delice de Bourgogne

2005-04-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

It is all too appropriate that Delice de Bourgogne sounds like an expensive 19th century courtesan. She is not the mistress of kings, but only the most sinfully delectable cheese on God’s green earth. The Delice is a wheel of ivory-coloured, triple-cream lusciousness, with a tangy flavor somewhere between fresh butter and blue cheese, and a texture so smooth and soft and melt-in-your-mouth that it is impossible to resist. It is all the reason you would ever need to love the French, in case you couldn’t think of one before.

I feel almost guilty, tempting anyone to a vice that is so damnably bad on the heart, but, hey, life is short. In my opinion, it just isn’t worth living without trying this lovely lady at least once.

"Blue" Movies

2005-03-29T01:35:00.000-08:00

Though I am passionate about championing sexual openness and universal access to accurate information about sex, and though I am (as anyone who as ever seen me attack a triple-cream cheese can probably attest) a committed hedonist, I have, in the past, placed myself in the camp of people who do not like “pornographic” or “adult” movies. However, in recent months, a few things have conspired to change my views on this beleaguered industry and its fascinating product.

The first, and most significant, is that I finally stumbled across some porn movies that I actually liked (Bliss with Juli Ashton and Eyes of Desire 2 with Missy, for the curious). This is much more difficult than it sounds, or than it should be. As Laurence O’Toole, author of Pornocopia, points out, there aren’t many people critically evaluating porn, and those who are have few pretensions to impartiality, since most of them are in the business of selling the very product they are reviewing. The cultural critics who seem to see it as the final frontier of postmodernism, and are mining it for whatever messages it might convey about gender, sex and power, mysteriously forget to say anything about how sexy or high quality it is, and unfortunately for me, Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland, the two stores whose desire to educate the public and provide a necessary service usually outweigh their need to make a profit, well, how shall I put this…They don’t always have the same turn-ons that I do. Then of course, there is the simple fact that porn is often low budget and definitely still stigmatized, and thus doesn’t necessarily draw the most talented writers or even the most passionate lovers to itself. Any attempt to find what I want in the sea of X-rated product has been a strictly hit-or-miss affair.

Those who have seen my previous comments on the subject may be wondering why I even bothered to continue searching. Well, for starters, I felt that I hadn’t given the genre a fair shake. I allowed my initial disappointment to derail my philosophical enthusiasm for the idea, and I ended up feeling disappointed in myself instead. The rest of the motivation to give porn another try came from the following three books. I share them with you now, because porn is such a huge, and largely unexamined part of our culture. Almost anyone could benefit from the window in to its world that these books provide. And, hey, they may just lead you to the “blue” movie you’ve been waiting for:

The Other Hollywood
By Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne

The Other Hollywood is an incredible collage of interviews from all manner of people connected to the adult film industry. There is not a piece of writing in the book that is not a quote from someone, and yet it has a definite narrative structure. Legs McNeil has managed to create a coherent whole out of literally thousands of disparate parts. Clearly his mind works in mysterious ways. He gave the punk movement the same treatment, in a book called Please Kill Me, but I have never heard of nor seen anyone else successfully create an historical document in this fashion, much less make it in to a fast-paced and suspenseful story. This he has done.

As to what The Other Hollywood can tell you about the industry, well, there are a number of elements that are exactly what you might expect: exploited and drug-addled women and men, suitcase pimp husbands, the Mafia, rapes, murders and sexually transmitted diseases. There are also a number of elements that may surprise you mightily: women entering the business because they see it as the only way to truly express themselves, true love, criminal FBI agents, artistic aspirations, plus technical and social revolutions driven by porn and its consumers. No matter where you stand on the question of pornography, I guarantee that you will find yourself questioning your own assumptions. And no matter where you stand, I guarantee that you will not want to put this fascinating book down once you’ve started it. (One caveat: the interviewees are entirely frank about a number of things that my mother—for instance—trained me not to discuss in public. Read at your own risk, of course.)

Find this book at Powell's

Pornocopia
By Laurence O’Toole

Pornocopia is a more traditionally executed attempt to make sense of porn’s history and its place in our culture. O’Toole tries to tackle the major factors effecting the adult film industry today, as well as the major reactions to it within our (for him, mainly Euro-centric) culture and within the law. This is a huge topic, and one gets the sense that he is really just trying to get some conversations going regarding the events and ideas that he details. Even so, he provides enough meat to leave the reader feeling engaged and informed. He takes us on to the set of a Vivid Video film, attempts to provide some examples of what a critical review of a hard core movie would look like, sketches some of the problems surrounding child pornography, and does a bit of crystal-ball-gazing at the Internet’s impact on the industry. O’Toole is decidedly pro-porn, but treats it seriously na’theless, making an effort to critically evaluate its impact on users and the world at large. He does make some very interesting points regarding the effect that complete legalization of porn (in the few countries that have done so) has had on gender relationships. You might be surprised at his observations, as well as the findings of formal studies on the matter. I know I was. In any case, the book is a quick read, and a good springboard for further discussion and study, as well as being fun in its own right.

Find this book at Powell's

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star
By Jenna Jameson & Neil Strauss

No, this is not a sex manual. It is a tell-all, “auto” biography, detailing Jenna Jameson’s rise to porn superstardom. It is a big, beautifully packaged book, and though it may lack the seriousness of the first two on this list, and though it sometimes reads more like a scrapbook than a memoir, it is nonetheless an entirely enjoyable example of the star-biography genre. In it, Jenna details her difficult childhood, her problems with drugs and terrible men, her dream of being a Vegas showgirl like her mother before her, and her ultimately practical decision to go where she could actually succeed financially: stripping, nude modeling and then films. It isn’t an entirely unfamiliar story, but this particular telling is charming, refreshingly forthright, and without self-pity or unnecessary apologies. It is accompanied by enough candid snapshots and glossy glamour photos to make anyone happy, and is further enhanced with mini-cartoons about stripping and suitcase pimps, plus Jenna’s hilarious commandments for those who might hope to date a porn star. The cover shows Jenna doing a surprisingly good Marilyn Monroe impression, but the resemblance stops at the blond hair. This girl is not a fainting flower the likes of Norma Jean, and thank goodness for that! Though the character Jenna conveys in the book can occasionally be exasperating, she leaves you cheering for her chutzpah. After all, we are talking about a girl who removed her own braces with a pair of pliers just to get an audition as a stripper. I certainly don’t have that kind of bravery, do you?

Find this book at Powell's

The Ethical Slut

2005-03-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

By Dossie Easton & Catherine A. Liszt

Polyamory has long intrigued me. When I was a kid, maybe 10 or so, I discovered (warning: geek origins revealed) Robert Heinlein. Now, Heinlein is atrocious, and wrong-headed on so many levels, but his books, rather intriguingly, often contain romantic and sexual relationships between groups of people, rather than just couples, and also show disdain for extreme jealousy between lovers. If Heinlein had written ‘Othello,’ Desdemona, Iago, Cassio, Emilia and the titular character would have ridden happily off in to the sunset together. In other words, it might not have made for very good literature. Compared to violent jealousy, a matter-of-fact, friendly acceptance of the vagaries of the human heart seems downright dull. Yet the idea of being free to follow your fancies (if not your every impulse), without betraying those you love seems like an adventure in to the unknown, full of exciting questions and plenty of mystery.

These were the terms in which the idea of polyamory was first introduced to me: placid domesticity--in which (for instance) various husbands, wives and lovers take turns doing dishes and changing diapers--mixed almost as calmly with a liberating sense of adventure. I have since rejected almost everything else Heinlein has to offer, and I wouldn’t even suggest him as a good starting point for the curious (his take on the subject doesn’t seem to dovetail with, um, reality), but this one idea stuck with me, along with the unshakeable sense that it was not only practical and thoroughly logical, but an interesting and exciting way to live. My concept of polyamory has altered drastically over the years, but I am still to this day convinced that there is something completely unnatural about sexual jealousy, and—to some extent—about long-term monogamy.

Which is not to say that all non-monogamous relationships are created equal. Cheating, lies and deceit seem like something else to me, and none of the poly communities I know accept such behaviors. I’ve also witnessed (and been a party to) relationships that purport to be “open” but are really only masking grievous problems under a fancy, hip label (another kind of lying, I guess). My two favorites of this particular variety are basically variations of one another. The first: “you are boring me, I am boring me, this relationship is boring both of us, so let’s spice it up with a little extracurricular fun and/or a threesome” open relationship; and the second: the “I desperately want to break up with you, but out of fear or inertia, am unable to work up the nerve, so I will encourage you to sleep with other people—or sleep with other people under your indifferent eye—in the hopes that one of those people will just take you away where I don’t have to deal with you” (aka “vine swinging”). Both of these sadly common styles of “open relationships” invariably end with said relationship completely destroyed, not to mention leaving opponents of polyamory plenty of ammunition.

If polyamory is going to work within a relationship, it requires far more care, planning, communication and trust than the scenarios I just described can provide. Which is where books like ‘The Ethical Slut’ come in. A bit earnest, and maybe a bit dated, this little handbook is still considered The Bible for polyamory.

The gist of the thing is; if you want to be an ethical slut (as they playfully call it), you have to do a LOT more talking than sleeping around. Couples who are considering even the most casual foray in to polyamory need to formulate, and to stick to their own ground rules, ones that take in to account personal safety (think STDs, pregnancy, sleazy folks and date rape drugs), both partners’ comfort levels with jealousy and personal preferences about a range of issues. Do you need to bring dates home to meet your primary partner? Do you need to call first? Must all encounters be shared? Can you sleep over? Must you stick to one-night stands, or should you only sleep with those you plan to continue to date and therefore know a bit more intimately? The list isn’t endless, but it is long, and books like ‘The Ethical Slut’ will help you get an idea of the territory (and the possibly hidden stumbling blocks) before you strike out on your adventure. It’s kind of like making sure you’ve thought of everything before you head to the North Pole. You’d hate to get to a place so little traversed and find that you’d missed something vital. It’s an adventure worth taking, but certainly not ill advisedly.

Now, having said all this, I’m sure I’ve completely mystified my parents, as well as the countless other people who know that I am getting married this year. Allow me to elaborate. Though I have never felt the need to sleep around on someone if they expressly told me that it would bother them, and in fact, find the dishonesty that would entail completely distasteful, I’ve also never felt the need to demand that kind of fidelity from anyone. Many people would have preferred me to do so, and to those people (you know who you are), my apologies, but for me, the moral issue is different than you might hope it to be (and this is leaving aside my shameless voyeuristic tendencies). Denying yourself something, where capitulation would harm nothing, is the closest thing to a sin that I know. It’s like rejecting a gift, and one that may never come around again. How can that be right? Life is too short, and the world is too grand.

I know that there are those who vehemently disagree with me (you know who you are, and so do I). As for those who don’t, please pack carefully for your adventure. You might consider ‘The Ethical Slut’ one of the 10 essentials…

Or, for more information online, try these websites:

The Society for Human Sexuality

Love That Works

Constantine (2005)

2005-03-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

Francis Lawrence, Director

Allow me to preface my review with the stipulation that I know nothing of the comic book upon which this movie was based. I cannot tell you if it is a faithful rendition, or a miserable failure of same. I can tell you that it is a pitch-perfect and visually stunning dystopian fantasy. The story borrows some of its weight from Catholic mythology, but the director (and I would imagine, the comic book author) uses this foundation very carefully, not relying on it too much, and also not allowing it to overwhelm the film or the viewer. Our anti-hero encounters demons and angels with an ironic resignation that only makes them seem more real to us, and we watch with delight as he spars with the Angel Gabriel (beautifully played by Tilda Swinton) or shakes out his coat and hunches in to the winds of Hell as if traversing some ordinarily unpleasant stretch of road.

Keanu Reeves slips in to the role of John Constantine, world-weary exorcist, as if it was made just for him. He is surrounded by a cast that is never anything less than completely convincing and is often (as in the case of Tilda Swinton) downright brilliant. And I know I don’t need to tell you to watch for the lovely Rachel Weisz, here playing a cop and good Catholic girl caught up in a suddenly demon-infested life, but I will anyway.

The real star of this film is, however, the cinematography. The low budget saves the film from looking too slick, and it is throughout graced with a sort of gritty perfectionism that further reinforces your belief in its characters. The settings, Hell included, somehow manage to be dreary and LA-ordinary, but to seem magically transformed by the camera in to beautiful other-worlds. I won’t spoil the fun by revealing any of the visual games or gifts that this film has to offer, but they are many and they are memorable.

In Praise of Eddie Izzard

2005-01-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

Right now and for the past few months, my “movie star” crush has been the fabulously hilarious Eddie Izzard. I mention it now because a number of his stand-up shows have just recently become available on DVD, and my evenings this week have been all-Eddie-Izzard-all-the-time. He is my favorite kind of comedian, in that he doesn’t resort to cruelty or personal comments about public figures, but instead inspires laughter with his insanely original and whimsical divagations about ordinary, everyday things. His stand-up meanders from religion to grocery stores to beekeeping and back again, but you can count on what he says about even the most mundane of these things to be something you never could have thought up on your own. The laughter is often startled out of you, and it goes on and on. I have to pause the show just to catch my breath, even when I’ve seen it all before.

Izzard is a brilliant comedian, but his surreal patter is greatly enhanced by the fact that he is a charming, good-looking Brit. This is really where my crush comes in. Yes, he’s funny, smart and talented, but he is also the sexiest transvestite I’ve ever seen. He has some great material on this subject, but the best part is that he just looks ten times hotter in lipstick than he does without. What can I say? I’m smitten, but don’t dismiss my advice on those grounds: run right out and see for yourself. He is absolutely guaranteed to cheer you up, and you may end up wanting to take him home.

Cloud Atlas

2004-12-23T01:13:00.000-08:00

By David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is a literary set of matryoshka nesting dolls. It consists of six interlocking stories that bracket one another to create a harmonious whole. It is exactly the kind of ingenious and original format that usually has the effect of driving me crazy with boredom and frustration. I will confess right now that I don’t like short stories. I prefer to get completely lost in a book and not be found for hours. Short stories are like a smack in the face or a one-course meal; just as you are getting interested in what is happening, it’s over. Collections of short stories are even worse; the pattern of reading them goes something like: identify, switch gears, struggle to snap out of the world of the previous story, identify, switch gears, and so on. And experimentally formatted collections of short stories? Well, let me also state for the record that I find the experimental tweaking of traditional literary formats to be a highly overrated and sadly over-popular game for contemporary authors. It is very difficult to do well--especially if one hasn’t mastered the forms as they are before trying to subvert them--, and is a poor substitute for a genuinely engaging topic. As far as I was concerned, this book had three strikes against it, which is why it came as a complete shock to me that I loved it.

Seeing as I am already confessing a bunch of stuff, I am going to go ahead and admit that I bought this book because of its beautiful cover. Little did I know that I would come to see its six beautiful panels as perfect visual representations for the six stories of which the book is comprised. I am not going to say more about this for fear of spoiling the fun, but I will say that watching the whole picture take shape out of six vastly different pieces is part of the excitement and of the meaning that can be taken from the book. The reason that this complex structure works to draw you in is, however, a very simple one: Mitchell has mastered the fine art of creating just enough mystery to keep you wanting to know more, but not so much mystery that you can’t get interested in what is happening in front of you. Each separate piece of the book begins and ends abruptly, but Mitchell doesn’t give you a moment in which to hesitate or adjust. Each time, you are plunged immediately in to a new situation that intrigues and interests you, and about which you cannot wait to hear more. It is only after he has lured you in too far for escape that he begins to tangle you up in his philosophic aims and structural toys.

For some reason, this works. It more than works, it enthralls. One last confession: I was supposed to be writing a paper the day I bought this book. Instead, I was rendered physically unable to start work on anything else until I read the very last page.

Find this book at Powell's

Before Sunset (2004)

2004-12-14T02:55:00.000-08:00

Richard Linklater, Director

God, I can’t tell you how much I hate being late to the party. It makes me crazy with embarrassment that I managed to miss this one, while every right-thinking person in the world trumpeted its many joys. I would give all the cash I possess and a bucket of tears to have seen this the first time on the big screen instead of on my basement television. Since that moment is now passed, all I can do is try to convey just a morsel, a portion of what it felt for me to watch this film, cold basement or no, in the hope that if you were thinking of missing it, you may change your mind.

There are perfectly wonderful movies that are entertaining in an uncomplicated way. They don’t leave you with questions, or tap you on the shoulder when you are trying to concentrate on something else, or inspire intense near-physical reactions long after you have gotten through the credits. Before Sunset is not one of those movies. The film is a real-time conversation between the characters--Jesse and Celine--of Before Sunrise, picking up from their parting in a Viennese train station nine years earlier. While I reacted to that first movie with nothing more than mild pleasure and interest, this one hit me like a shot of straight bourbon.

As Jesse and Celine walk through a beautiful twilight in Paris, they reveal themselves in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible at 23. It is in the revelation of their pain and regret that the importance of their initial encounter becomes clear. You watch them talking so easily and pleasurably together, and underlying each moment of humor or intellectual playfulness is this weight of missed opportunities. The continued intensity of their connection is a source of happiness for them (also you as a viewer), and perversely, their sadness only adds depth to that pleasure. It only stands to reason. How can you really understand what something means if you don’t know what is at stake, what you risk with each choice? This is the lesson that the characters have learned in the intervening years, and watching them thrill to the simple fact that they still are able to reach one another is almost excruciatingly wonderful.

For this, among other reasons, Before Sunset feels as if it is conveying something real. There is nothing mundane about it, but it has the ring of truth. Watching the actors, you can see that their heightened emotional state is not unlike something you have experienced or would experience in a similar situation. The film actually began to pull up and polish off my own time-dulled memories of past moments of desire and excitement, so that when the final moment came, it seemed as if I was feeling it instead of watching it. And let me tell you, I rewound and “felt” it again, and my head has been “rewinding” it ever since.

In Praise of 'Arts & Letters Daily'

2004-11-30T01:53:00.000-08:00

I must thank a co-worker for sending me the address to this glorious webpage. It is crammed to the rafters with links to reliably strange, interesting and smart content culled from the rest of the web. It isn’t a blog exactly, although it shares many features with the genre. The editorial choices are such that ‘Arts & Letters Daily’ more resembles an excellent general interest magazine or journal. Its brilliant curmudgeon of an editor, Denis Dutton, calls it a “daily reading list with attitude." All I know is that I try to read a bit from it each day, and I am always engaged with what I find therein. I am sometimes infuriated, often shocked, occasionally perplexed, yes, but always, always riveted. Even when I am stamping my feet in frustration after reading some article or other, I am eagerly awaiting the next one. There aren’t many things that will do that for me, and nearly none of them are on the World Wide Web. If there is such a thing as a webpage capable of single-handedly raising the level and quality of debate in this world, this one is a top candidate. Read it and rejoice…

"Real" Literature???

2004-11-23T01:10:00.000-08:00

I am known in these parts as a “reader.” By which I think the people who so call me mean: a reader of a better quality of book than the ones that they read. All I really know is that people whose eyes light up at the idea of a new book waiting for them at home take one look at me and suddenly feel as if that book isn’t quite good enough, that they should be reading something more serious or literary, that they should be slogging through something that they like a little less because it has more worth. Their faces fall and they can’t even tell me what’s on their bedside table. Little do they know that my idea of a good book is just as likely to be a funny, sexy romance novel or a children’s book as it is to be the latest “novel of ideas.”

There is something wrong about any notion that causes a real reader to feel ashamed of her favorite books. In my opinion, a good book is something that reads well and has heart, within which criteria you can fit many things, from Middlemarch to Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It. Also in my humble opinion, all readers are qualified to make the distinction between great, merely good and truly bad writing. They often choose not to, but anyone whose eyes light up because of words on a page is fully qualified to make that choice.

Whatever the case, there seems to be a belief floating around in the world that “real” literature must be dull, incomprehensible and inhuman, that if something speaks to the many it must not have value or be truly excellent. The following is a list of (reasonably recent) novels whose mere existence emphatically refutes such an argument:

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Possession by A. S. Byatt
Eveless Eden by Marianne Wiggins
About a Boy by Nick Hornby
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
This Is Not a Novel by David Markson

May I have a happy ending, please?

2004-11-11T01:42:00.000-08:00

The connection between sex and death is not a trivial one, I’ll grant you. Just on the most obvious level, every new child brought in to the world is in a sense, a new death. In this age of HIV and AIDS, new sexual encounters carry with them the fear of death. And there are numerous more finely shaded emotional, spiritual and philosophical connections that can be made between sex and mortality, but even so, I am deeply tired and troubled by the persistent theme in film and literature of the great passion that leads inexorably to a horrible end. Must all the great lovers die in the end?

I do realize that the eventual answer to that question is always going to be “yes,” but in the last five years, I have seen several films in which a direct causal connection is implied between great sex or passion and a miserable death at an early age or a tragic separation. Compared with the hundreds or thousands of films produced each year, this seems an insignificant number, but compare it with the depressingly small number of films that bother to depict real desire and affection between two people and you will see how meaningful it really is. Oh, characters in romantic comedies throw one another down on sofas, surprise themselves with kisses on busy street corners, flaunt their long legs in tight jeans or short skirts and cut eyes at one another over drinks, but you don’t get the sense, as a viewer, that they actually have a physical awareness of one another. Rare are the times I catch my breath in exhilaration at the chemistry vibrating between two supposedly romantic leads.

Which is why it is a crying shame that the few film couples who actually manage to convey real awareness of one another as people, as well as real physical longing for each another, must inevitably end in misery. Take the beautiful Welsh creation, Solomon and Gaenor (Director Paul Morrison, 1999). The “tagline” for this film is "their tragedy was to fall in love,” but watching the two principles on screen, you can’t hardly see how they could have helped themselves. When they are in a room together, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up in sympathy for the yearning they convey. Their brief courtship is played out almost entirely with glances, and is fiery enough to make the viewer feel their impatience to be with one another, while at the same time seeming incredibly gentle and delicate. You want them to love each other, and they do. It feels like a betrayal when they are separated first by misunderstanding, then by family, and then irrevocably.

The romantic strength of Keith Gordon’s Waking the Dead rests entirely in its two beautiful and open-countenanced actors: Jennifer Connelly and Billy Crudup. Jennifer Connelly always seems so direct and honest, as if her character’s life really was her own. Here, she captures you with the feeling she gives off of simply being emphatically, absolutely present in what is happening to her. Crudup’s young politician doesn’t have a chance, nor would he want one. You sense that they truly see each other, and want what they see, though it may not fit with who they are. The film begins 10 years after Connelly’s character Sara’s death, so I won’t be telling tales out of school when I say that those differences are what pull them apart. The film is really more about ambition and character than it is about love, but the gold-tinged love flashbacks are the liveliest things about it. They leave you wondering if any achievement that springs from a sacrifice of that magnitude could possibly be worth it.

The British “comedy” called Crush (Director John McKay, 2001) is what really got me going on this theme in the first place. While the tragedies of the two films above, however unfair, are reasonably embedded in the situations and the characters from the beginning, this particular film should have ended happily like the romantic comedy it purports to be. The film isn’t initially a love story, I admit. It is about a group of friends “of a certain age” who meet to drink and commiserate and laugh every week, and who are scandalized when one of their number begins a reckless and raunchy fling with a boy barely more than half her age. The film rates this list because the chemistry between these two is immediate and their sex is hot and daring-though-not-explicit. It is exactly the kind of sizzle that you hope for in a romantic comedy, pushed one tiny, exciting step further. Well, apparently that one step further is a bit too far, and everyone had to be punished for it. The film initially adheres to the tropes of a good romantic comedy: attraction, misunderstanding, friends getting in the way, and eventual reconciliation. At which point, it takes a sudden and alarming turn to the unnecessarily maudlin. You are left at the end saying to yourself “huh?” That’s as much articulation of your disappointment as you are able to muster. It’s as if someone told you, “Look over there!” and then hit you on the head with a brick. It leaves you with the suspicion that someone really did think that having great sex with a beautiful boy was something for which one should be punished, and severely.

If this is indeed the intended message of any of the above movies, it goes without saying that I most certainly disagree with it. I also don’t see why we can’t have just a few more scorching romances that end with the lovers settling down to a gloriously complacent and long life together. The deck seems woefully stacked the other way. If we honestly can’t see the compatibility between passion and long-term happiness, then there is something more wrong with us than we think.

If you want film versions of this utopia, they do exist, though they are few. I also find that picking a film like Solomon and Gaenor and watching only half of it works almost as well in a pinch. Otherwise, try these:

Moonstruck (Director Norman Jewison, 1987)
Born Romantic (Director David Kane, 2000)
Children of a Lesser God (Director Randa Haines, 1986)
Secretary (Director Steven Shainberg, 2002)
Hope Springs (Director Mark Herman, 2003)

In Praise of Mango Pickle

2004-11-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

My sweetheart has been experimenting with vegetarian Indian food, using a gigantic tome by Yamuna Devi called Lord Krishna’s Cuisine. This is fantastic in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that it allows me to indulge my love for mango pickle three or four times a week. In case you have never encountered “mango pickle” or “mango relish” or “aam ka achaar,” it is made from some combination of sour, unripe mangoes and salt, spices and oil. It is intended to stimulate the appetite with a burst of flavor, and my goodness if it doesn’t do just that!

I love mango pickle as if it were made just for me. I have always, always had a salt tooth. As a child, I craved olives, cheese, crackers and pickles. I used to beg my (Greek) babysitter for kalamata olives while everyone else ate graham crackers and milk. I will still eat brie instead of cake for dessert any day, and I still thrill to super-salty foods, of which this is definitely one. You aren’t really supposed to eat more than a little bit with your food, but the stuff is completely addictive to me. Once I taste a little bit, I just want more and more and more. I can’t even explain it, the desire is so intense.

Mango pickle, it has been pointed out to me, is not for everyone. Some people find the flavors too strong. It is spicy, sour and salty all at once, and can seem like a kick in the tongue if you aren’t prepared for it. However, I think everyone should at least try it. Its intensity is almost exhilarating, which is something you don’t find yourself very often saying about a condiment.

The Shadow of the Wind

2004-10-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The eternal curse of the fast reader is that there is never enough to read. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Say what, girl? Are you on crack?” And of course it’s true that there are more books published every day, far too many for one person to ever, ever, read. The books that are so good they make your toes curl with happiness, so original as to make you want to cry with gratitude, and so exciting as to keep you up all night racing to find out what happens next, however, are few in number, and it sometimes seems as if that number is not even keeping up by percentage with all the other damn junk.

So, while I can entertain myself for months on end with other things, I really live for those moments when I discover something like The Shadow of the Wind. I am sitting here, freshly mesmerized by the last exhilarating page, and saddened with the knowledge that I can never again read it for the first time. If you are lucky, that moment is still ahead of you.

I am not actually going to tell you a lot about the book, because the author intentionally keeps his reader in the dark about a number of key points of the story until the last possible moment, and the suspense is so delicious I don’t want to ruin it for you. I will tell you that it is set in Barcelona before, during and after the Spanish Civil War and WWII, that it is eerie and romantic, and that it includes a place called ‘The Cemetery of Lost Books’ which made me wish (not for the first time) that I could just once, pretty please, step in to the pages of the book I was reading.

Find this book at Powell's

50 First Dates (2004)

2004-10-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

Peter Segal, Director

Drew Barrymore and I are the same age. In a sense, I grew up with her, have known about her almost all my life. I first saw her when everyone else did: the day my mom took me to see ‘ET.’ I haven’t seen everything she’s ever done, and I don’t remember every story I’ve read about her in the movie industry magazines, but I have been aware of her ever since, and I am deeply glad that she (unlike so many child stars) survived her teen years and is still making movies. She has got to be the most loveable star of my generation. She just radiates liveliness and openness and adorable-ness. And, is she luscious, my goodness! I hate to be the 500th person who calls her a peach, but that is definitely what she is. She has an innocent quality to her that mixes strangely with the something else about her that makes one think of tumbling around on rumpled sheets for hours. She is the perfect actress for romances of all kinds, because it is always completely believable that her costar, whoever he is, would be smitten.

Drew Barrymore is the only reason I paid for my ticket to see ’50 First Dates,’ and in the end, I was glad that I had. The premise is flimsy, but essentially goodhearted, and the principal characters lend enough of their goofy charm to smooth one over the rough patches. I am not going to go in to great detail about the plot except to say that the film makes it seem much more plausible and interesting than it sounds, and that it is played for sweetness much more than for slapstick. It is definitely enough to perk you up on a gray fall day, and is for-crying-out-loud set in beautiful Hawaii!

One warning: the first 20 minutes are decidedly shaky. There are some truly mean-spirited jokes in the first 10 of them, and the film doesn’t hit its stride as quickly as might otherwise be wished, but if you stick with it, you will be rewarded.

In Praise of a Good Cry

2004-10-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

In the movie ‘Broadcast News,’ Holly Hunter’s character schedules a 5-minute cry for herself every morning. In the context of the film, the action is (I think) intended as a commentary on the weirdness of her life and profession, but it resonates with many people who are not in her circumstance. We can almost all remember at least one time when crying has made us feel a whole lot better for no real reason. I am personally descended from a long line of “cry-ers.” The Mazzara side of my family (note the Italian) will cry at the drop of the hat, with little or no provocation, in or out of the privacy of our own homes, and I have done little or nothing to buck this fine tradition. Ask anyone. I cry all the time. I cry when someone helps a little kid across the street, I cry when I see kittens, I cry at the thought of Doctors Without Borders, I cry when people yell at me (well, unless I am yelling right back), I cry when a good book ends.

Seeing as I have done all of this crying, I have also had a lot of time to think about those moments right after your tears stop. Because--and it doesn’t matter if your dog has just died or if the movie just got to be too much--while you are drying your eyes and blowing your nose, you feel noticeably better than you did before you started out weeping. Why is that exactly? I am sure there are copious papers and books on the subject, but here is what I think. For one thing, crying, though it does constitute a rough indicator of your internal state to an outside observer, is essentially private. It is more contemplative than it is communicative, though it can be used in either way. You can’t really talk while you sob, and you are closed off from external stimuli. Your mind focuses on your internal landscape. While I am crying, it feels a bit like I am cleaning out all of the accumulated junk from the past week. Sometimes this can be a bad thing, one resentment touching off another in a cascading rush of icky-ness, but often it is a good way of getting in touch with what is really bothering you and making peace with it. You are, after all, expressing your hurt, even if you aren’t articulating it, and sometimes that is enough.

The other thing, and it can be a two-edged sword, is that you definitely feel alive when you cry. It, like laughing and a couple of other fundamental things, taps you right in to something that kills all numbness instantly. I always know I am really in trouble if I can’t even summon up a tear about something. Real horror for me is an icy-cold distance from my own problems. Some people don’t agree, and in fact, find tears difficult or distasteful. Well, I urge them all to give Holly Hunter’s solution just one try.

(If you happen to need help summoning said tears, I have found Anthony Minghella’s ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ to be a fool-proof three-hankie tear factory, as well as a fantastic movie everyone should see.)

The Nautical Chart

2004-10-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

by Arturo Perez Reverte

If anyone claims not to be fascinated by buried treasure, they are clearly lying. There are so many great stories of pirate’s maps with x-marks-the-spot treasure chests, and more get written every day. Even better than that is the tantalizing notion that there are countless jewels and gold coins and priceless relics at the “bottom of the sea.” The ocean maintains its mystery even in these days of satellite photos and computer-generated maps. We still haven’t and can’t explore it all. And it moves! The water sometimes seems to have a mind of its own, it isn’t trustworthy, and therefore is still curious and interesting. All of which things ‘The Nautical Chart’ plays to the hilt. It is decidedly contemporary, following the fortunes of a stranded sailor in this world where his kind of sailing is rapidly being replaced by computers and satellites. We enter his scene in decidedly contemporary Barcelona, but the book veers rather wonderfully in to the deliciously old-fashioned tropes of a good sea mystery almost immediately. In quick succession, our sailor stumbles in to a beautiful, mysterious woman, an old atlas, and a job offer involving the salvage of something unbelievably precious. He is sucked in to the scheme, powerless to resist the triple charm, and so are we. I followed each twist breathlessly, right up to the last gasp.

Find this book at Powell's

Moonstruck (1987)

2004-10-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

Norman Jewison, Director

I just started Library School this week, and since this signifies such a frighteningly huge change in the direction of my life and its daily business, I have been comforting myself with a few trustworthy old charmers. This particular film has always been my first choice in times of upheaval. When it comes to sheer, unadulterated joy, ‘Moonstruck’ cannot be beat. It is a comical rendition of Italian melodrama, set in Brooklyn, and scored with arias from ‘La Boheme’ and with the best moon-song known to Guido: ‘That’s Amore.’ My entire family loves this movie, in part because we see ourselves there. Everything about it is at once exaggerated and somehow simultaneously true to life.

Cher as widowed accountant Loretta Castorini is lovely in this film, with her glamour turned down, hiding under frizzy, salt-and-pepper hair and a dash of cynicism. She makes you forget almost instantly that she is Cher-the-Icon. And she fits seamlessly in to a cast of perfect Brooklyn characters, who seem to typify the second-generation Italian-American experience, but never stoop to stereotype. There are so many wonderful people and moments here, I don’t even know where to begin. Olympia Dukakis, playing Loretta’s mother, is perfectly tart and sarcastically wise. She spends the film asking everyone she meets why men chase women, and is hilariously unsatisfied with any answer that disagrees with her own. Loretta’s grandfather (played by Feodor Chaliapin, who has been in the movie business since 1926) tells his 6 dogs to howl at the full moon, “Why do you make me wait?” he asks. Nicholas Cage is smoldering and goofy all at once, as the outrageously melancholy baker who is brother of Loretta’s fiancé. Countless others appear and reappear, adding to the weave of family life, and commenting upon the trials of Loretta and her family.

For, though ‘Moonstruck’ is ostensibly a romance, it is really about what it means to be part of a web of people, connected by location, by shared history, and by culture. The film always makes me think sweetly of my crazy family, their strange and temperamental ways, and how much I love being part of something larger than myself. It also makes me glad that I belong to a family that appreciates its individual place in “the Melting Pot” as people from Italy, that bothers to remember what makes us different, as well as what makes us Americans, Thank goodness for that.

In Praise of Food-as-Spectacle

2004-09-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

When she was pregnant with me, my mom couldn’t stand to handle food, so my dad took over the cooking, and he has never given it back. What you need to know about my dad, that will help you to understand why I love good food so much, is that he isn’t interested in just doing something; he wants to know everything there is to know about it and be the best at it that it is possible for him to be. Buy a bicycle for him and a year later he will be riding it day and night, taking it apart and puttting it back together, racing on the weekends, and collecting other, more special bicycles using the miracle of the internet. So it was in the kitchen.

My father grew up in a very traditional Irish-Italian Catholic family, so he had seen some great food being prepared, but as boys were on no account taught how to make said food, he had a lot of catching up to do! Catch up he did. Starting with Julia Child and moving outward from there, he taught himself how to use knives, how to make sauces, what pans to use for what, how to bake, how to dress meat, and anything else you can think of. By the time I woke up to the world, and started noticing foods that weren’t pureed, he had hundreds of cookbooks, dozens of knives and other more inscrutable cooking implements, plus a budding collection of copper pots.

And the food, oh my! The most outrageous spectacle I remember from my childhood is the gigantic croquembouche that my father made for a Christmas party. If you have never seen such a thing, picture dozens of small cream puffs, formed in to an open cone that is a foot and a half high, and held together by carefully drizzled caramelized sugar. We were almost too impressed to eat it. Almost. Even on ordinary days, I remember blessing my good fortune at being woken up to hot popovers or apple turnovers before school, at being sent off with freshly made truffles in my lunch box, at coming home to the smell of real, homemade pasta sauce, or salt pork sizzling in a pan about to be Fettucine Carbonara. As soon as my brother and I were old enough, we always ate together as a family, often with the addition of my parent’s friends, who seemed to drop in every other day for a home-cooked meal. My father still does the cooking in my parent’s house (although my mother does have a repertoire of delicious dishes she sometimes pulls out for company), but he has calmed down considerably since I was 5 years old, or else gotten so practiced that everything seems easy when he is making it.

Needless to say, I don’t live with them anymore, but wonderful food is still at the center of what I consider the good life. Thankfully, my sweetheart (another excellent cook) agrees with me. In addition to lovely home cooked meals, over the last few years, we have had some amazing culinary adventures. There are still places in town where every tiny detail of a meal and the serving thereof is near-perfection. At The Herbfarm, the wait-staff carry silver buckets of ice, and use tongs to drop single perfect cubes in to your water glass. At The Georgian Room, the hostess, upon seeing that I was wearing a black dress, whisked away my white napkin and brought me a soft black one so that my skirt wouldn’t get lint on it. At Rover’s they set each place with a small, flat jelly spoon so that you can scoop the last precious drop of sauce off each plate without using your fingers. I don’t even need to tell you that you definitely want to savor every last drop.

Many people see these places as a ridiculous indulgence, and perhaps they are, but an experience like any one of those I just described can last you an entire year or lifetime, nurturing your imagination long after it is over. And there is something poignant about these dinners, at least for me. The truth is, it isn’t going to be possible to get the kind of food that I love forever. Small farms are being consumed by gigantic conglomerates, the earth in which perfect forest mushrooms are found is being paved over and colonized by housing developments, the artisans who make tiny wonderful cheeses are retiring without passing on their secrets, in the entire world, there isn’t a piece of produce that isn’t tainted by pollution, global warming. I fully intend to suck the last drop of sweetness out of this life while it is available to me, and so should you.

The Canterbury Tales

2004-09-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

By Geoffrey Chaucer

I don’t usually feel the need to trumpet the joys of works already well placed within the Western Canon, for the simple reason that most people end up encountering them somewhere without my help. I make an exception here because there is always a chance you have missed reading Chaucer in school for whatever reason, and aren’t planning to personally remedy that loss. You may not think so, but it would be a terrible tragedy for anyone to go through life without reading at least a few of Chaucer’s verse-tales.

I first encountered him in a course where he was paired with Shakespeare. This seems like a logical pairing, even given the couple hundred years between the two, but the combination was greatly Shakespeare’s disadvantage. Chaucer is so likeable; his work is so forthright, funny and humane. He is definitely capable of savagely ripping in to people or types whom he sees as hypocritical, but he is in general forgiving of foibles, and so jolly an observer of human nature as to be a very pleasant companion. Next to him, Shakespeare seems so cynical and curmudgeonly and opaque, even his comedies somehow twisted and unhappy.

The Canterbury Tales is essentially an incomplete work, but even as it is, it has a great deal to say about people, relationships and people’s relationship to the divine. And, as I am sure you have heard before, it is packed full of ripping good yarns, which are by turns funny, tragic fantastical and ironical. Their relevance and excitement haven’t lost a thing in the intervening years; it’s as if Chaucer is sitting right beside you at the College Inn, whispering them in your ear.

(A word about the Middle English: there are contemporary translations of The Canterbury Tales, but don’t run to them without first trying him out in the original. The Middle English isn’t as difficult to puzzle out as it looks at first, and it ends up being part of the fun. There will seem to be an inordinate number of Ys and Es, but if you sound out the words in your head, they will for the most part make sense to you, and any good edition will footnote the few words whose meanings have changed so much as to be unrecognizable.)

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Rounders (1998)

2004-09-26T01:13:00.000-07:00

John Dahl, Director

When I was a kid, many of my friends were beautifully geeky boys, whose interests were just about equally divided between books, computer games and seedily romantic bar-games like pool or poker. One of the after effects of this for me is an abiding affection for those very bar games, and for all of the strange stories that crowd around poker and pool players. What a strange thing it is, the way people change you without your notice, permanently coloring your perceptions of the world and the things you choose to like. I can’t say I’m sorry, since occasionally those promptings lead me to gifts like this one.

‘Rounders’ is, in addition to being the best poker movie I know about, another stellar example of Edward Norton’s ability to outshine his Hollywood heartthrob co-stars. Matt Damon is the heartthrob of whom I speak. Here, he plays a brilliantly talented poker player who ends up as the rope in a game of tug-of-war between Norton’s morality free zone and Gretchen Mol’s desire for an honest law-student boyfriend. Norton’s character lights up the screen; he is edgy, dangerously delusional and seductively bad. You can see how Damon’s character gets pulled in to the mess he creates, and how he is charmed in to following the advice of his friend no matter how illogical.

What is interesting about ‘Rounders’ is that the “bad guy” is the one who is right. The film doesn’t make any pretense about sympathizing with the idea that playing poker is the right life for Damon’s character, Mike. The pull of the game, the rush of it is in every scene of the film. Mike’s day job—the law—or his day girlfriend, who is barely present as a character, are no match for the romance of poker. Which is all to the good for us, because the life of a Manhattan “rounder” is a fantastical one, is more than enough to drive the film forward. It is all the sweeter for not being tainted by false moralizing. Mike loves the game, as we would if we were as talented as he so clearly is, and the film is true to that love, which is as it should be. And we get to sit at his shoulder while he wins and loses and wins again, which is more than enough for me.

In Praise of Dreaming

2004-09-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

Some days just feel crummy, and there isn’t a thing that seems to make them better. You look around and second-guess every choice you’ve made, distrust any happiness you may feel, and look back on your life only to see a tangle of wrong turns. What is there to praise on a day like this? Well, I’ll tell you, and it may sound trite, but it is true: a good night’s sleep. That’s right, sometimes the only way to change your day is to go ahead and start a new one.

I’ve always been a night person, and as a child, I found it incredibly difficult to fall asleep just because my parents shut off the light. I remember countless nights spent staring at the lights from Aurora Ave coming in through the window and making up stories, doing useless math problems and planning my future. I am to this day often awake in to the wee hours of the morning, but when I do curl up under the covers and fall asleep what a wonderful thing it is. I love my bed, my comfy blankets, my soft mattress; I love to doze for hours after the sun has come up, but most of all I love to dream. I don’t feel the need to recount them to others, but my dreams always seem exciting and wonderful to me. Often I am taking part in outrageous adventures, unlike any book I’ve read, but still as coherent as a story, or I just get the disjointed but wonderful experience of exploring somewhere deliciously cockeyed (as all dream worlds are) and I wake up still slightly tilted, and definitely in a different mood than the one I lay down with.

The world seems freshly interesting after a good dream, and you are freshly able to deal with what comes at you. At the very least, you have something new to ponder, some image to take with you as you navigate the ordinary world. Sometimes, that is all it takes to turn things around.

The Ladies of Missalonghi

2004-09-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

By Colleen McCullough

File this one under “guilty pleasure,” but don’t feel too bad about it. ‘The Ladies of Missalonghi’ is a perfectly delicious little fairy-tale romance, a Cinderella story set in the Australian Outback, if you can imagine Cinderella as a mousy, bookish “spinster” moldering away in genteel poverty on a farm with her loving mother and aunt. If you prefer your princesses to rescue themselves, to revenge themselves on their enemies, and to run off with their new-money princes in to the wilds of the bush, then look no further. This book abounds with many funny and quietly lovely details, and the crescendo of good fortune that falls upon the previously beleaguered heroine will leave almost anyone smiling in satisfaction.

I feel I must warn you that it is just old-fashioned enough to cause the occasional twinge to new readers, but the book, like any really good indulgence, can be polished off in an afternoon, so even if you don’t love it, it won’t hurt for long.

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Fight Club (1999)

2004-09-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

David Fincher, Director

No one who knows me is going to argue with my assertion that I am a little nutty, and following from that premise, they also won’t be a bit surprised to hear that I go through periods of time where I want to watch nothing but one particular movie (for corroborative evidence, see “In Praise of Trivia” and “Clueless”). It may however surprise some of you that I have at one time or another had ‘Fight Club’ on a permanent loop on my DVD player. Well, I had a crush on Edward Norton for one thing. God, is he dreamy, so angry-looking, razor-sharp, full of energy and cunning, and a complete chameleon, his weedy little voice taking on the dulcet tones of an innocent, or the rage of a killer. I could watch him all day long, and did. ‘Fight Club’ is his movie, even next to Brad Pitt he shines, and his strangely sheepish narration was my favorite companion.

But if the charms of Edward Norton were all I was after, I could have taken a shine to ‘Primal Fear’ or ‘Everyone Says I Love You’ or what-have-you. No, I loved this particular movie for itself as well. It is a perfectly controlled entertainment; every scene is built seamlessly from the previous one, and all leading you inexorably to one conclusion. Every tiny detail of the film is flawlessly rendered. David Fincher is famous for his meticulously created puzzles, and he has done it again here. There are moments when the film is disgusting and/or violent, but it never breaks rank with itself, you are never given the opportunity to point out inconsistencies, they just aren’t large enough to see.

Those who haven’t seen ‘Fight Club’ may also be surprised to hear that its message is essentially hopeful and humanist. It rather pitilessly narrows in on the alienation and loneliness of urban life, and at first offers up a number of preposterous alternatives to that alienation. The alternatives function as a stylized explanation for what can and truly does happen to people who live without hope in a world that doesn’t care about them, but they also lead us, and the characters, to a new answer. I always breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the film, as if the world has been saved for another day. This is the only time I am going to say this, but even the book doesn’t resolve the problem as elegantly as this film does.

In Praise of Voting

2004-09-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

In the last election, half of my friends didn’t vote, and let me tell you, if I had a nickel for every time some well-meaning person told me that it was pointless and they never bothered voting, I would be a wealthy woman. Me, I love to vote. It makes me feel like a real citizen, it is the one thing I do that connects me to the birth of my country, to the crazy geniuses who won us our independence in the first place, and it is one of the things I can do to take part in real change. I would feel as if I was being ungrateful and ungracious if I didn’t vote; for crying out loud, it wasn’t barely 85 years ago that the Suffrage Movement won women the vote! How can anyone stand to waste their efforts by refusing to use the rights they bought us?

Now, for those who don’t see how their particular vote can possibly matter, I will turn your attention to the 2000 Presidential Election. I am sure you have heard this before, but let me pound the point to death one more time. A mere 540-odd votes made the difference between one candidate and the other in Florida! That is a drop in the bucket compared to the total population of the state, never mind the country! And voter turnout was less than 50%, in Florida as in the rest of the nation! Even if every single person who voted had brought along a friend, that would or could have changed the course of history. Hell yes, your vote matters!

There is yet one further reason I vote: it wins me the right to complain. This is a strictly enforced, unwritten law of social discourse, in case you didn’t know it. If you don’t vote, when you comment at all about the state of the union, what you get from your friends is: “Did you vote? No? Well then, don’t complain!” And it’s true. If you care enough to rant about what is happening in politics today, then you clearly care enough to lick the stamp for an absentee ballot, for crying out loud!

In Washington, the deadline for voter registration for the general election is 30 days before the election; you still have time…

Washington State Voter Registration

Declare Yourself (with links to every state's voter registration page)

Just Vote

Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes & Remembrances

2004-09-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

By Marlena De Blasi

For New Year’s Eve this year, I made a recipe out of this cookbook. It was a hollowed-out pumpkin, filled with mascarpone, emmenthaler, fresh chanterelles, shaved truffles, butter-toasted croutons and a few herbs and spices which was then baked until the pumpkin flesh softened and mixed with all of those luscious ingredients. I have never smelled or tasted anything quite like it, but De Blasi convinced me of its majesty with a few well-chosen words of description, and I definitely don’t regret the time spent on its creation. It was sweet and savory and warm and comforting and outrageously rich and delicious, while simultaneously being a perfectly balanced, entirely original flavor.

This wondrous concoction is one of hundreds of incredible recipes that De Blasi has collected straight from their sources all over the Italian countryside. Most recipes are accompanied by a description of the first time she encountered the dish, inevitably in a sun-drenched field, sitting around a goatherd’s fire, or in the kitchen of a small town’s only pasta maker, or some other such picturesque but authentic location. Their authenticity is displayed in the recipes, which have the curious simplicity and richness of foods that are unmediated by a famous chef’s need to be cool or fit in to the latest fad. Just reading about them makes me feel as if I am starving, and that particular dish is the only thing that will satisfy me. I am not sure I can live another minute without gorgonzola drizzled with warm chestnut honey or pasta stuffed with pumpkin, amaretti and mostarda di Cremona or rabbit braised in white wine with drunken prunes. And why should I? I have a perfectly clear, concise recipe right here in front of me!

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The Grifters (1990)

2004-09-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

Stephen Frears, Director

I have a soft spot for con movies. If a film goes to the trouble of articulating the details of a complicated confidence scheme; shows me the hair-raising reversals, the clever double-crosses and the eventual successes and/or spectacular losses, I don’t trouble myself at all about whether or not the characters are likeable or worthy of my sympathy. The puzzle is all I need for pleasure. ‘The Grifters’ is no exception, and in fact, is so littered with amoral characters as to be the perfect proof of my weakness.

For what else can you call it when I am secretly rooting for Steve Martin’s con man character in ‘The Spanish Prisoner’, excited to see Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crowne pull the wool over the eyes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and delighted when the cast of ‘Sneakers’ hacks in to the air traffic control system and the World Bank? I am definitely harboring a love for outlaws, but part of my joy is merely ego. Like the characters I just mentioned, I personally am never going to be able to physically overpower someone, but there is a good chance I could outwit a number of people if I tried. Unlike an action movie, a con or caper film presents the tantalizing possibilities that would be available to me (as to almost anyone) if I had just a tiny bit less of a conscience.

Watching someone go for what they want without reservation or care for what happens to the people around them is just as beautifully exhilarating as it is creepy, and ‘The Grifters’ has heaping tablespoons of both the beauty and the creepiness. It is definitely not a caper movie. It has that bleak, inevitable awfulness of the best noir of the 40s, a resemblance that is reinforced by a very old-fashioned, seedy kind of glamour. The score is entirely orchestral, the settings are the sunnily sinister backstreets of California and the women all wear 4-inch heels and red lipstick. The film is deliriously clever, with a tight, sharp story arc. It has many of the fun elements of a good caper; where the horror comes in is when you realize that every character is on the grift. There isn’t an innocent “mark” to leaven things. It is like watching the fly get caught by the spider, which then gets eaten by the mouse, who is in turn devoured by the cat. But like I say, I go weak in the knees for a good con, and while there are definitely moments of real agony in ‘The Grifters,’ every moment is also a delight.

In Praise of Perfume

2004-09-09T01:34:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, I reluctantly gave up smoking. When the dust finally settled, and I could go through my day without murderous thoughts about anyone who told me how proud of me they were, I discovered that (gasp!) I had a sense of smell. Not only that, but all of a sudden (partially out of sheer gratitude), I loved scents of all kinds. White lilies were bursting with heavy, sexy sweetness, roses smelled of lemons, of tea, of raspberries, jasmine just made me want to curl up with whatever smelled like it and never get up. And nuances were available to me again, oh my! I could tell when someone had put nutmeg in their Fettucine Alfredo, taste the difference between Bombay Sapphire and Tanqueray, and—I swear!—smell an entire universe in a glass of good wine.

At just this moment, I discovered the joys of good perfume again. Perfume has to be my very favorite luxury. For one thing, there is absolutely no way it could be mistaken for a necessity; it is purely about pleasure. Some folks may say to themselves that they use perfume for other people, but there really isn’t any way to judge how someone else is going to respond to a scent that drives you wild with happiness. The truth is, with perfume, the only person you can be sure to please is yourself. With thousands of extravagant concoctions to choose from, this is hardly a tragedy. Finding just the right perfume can become a lovely kind of quest.

I have been trying out and discarding new scents for, oh, I don’t know, 20 years maybe. My first bottle of eau de toilette was a gift from my mother; L’Air Du Temps, it was called. It was the perfect light scent for a young girl, and was followed by a little parade of suitably white and floral offerings, such as Anais Anais, named for (again) my mother’s favorite diarist, and purportedly based upon a formula made up just for Ms. Nin by a perfumer relative. In high school, partially out of rebellion, I went through a short period of wearing incredibly syrupy and heavily spiced rose-based oils, which were followed by way too much sandalwood in college. The year I graduated from Evergreen, I discovered Clinique’s Happy, which smells a bit like orange-blossom-infused whipped cream. Yum. But still not quite right. It was only 2 years ago that I hit on something that feels just right, just like me, something that makes me happy every time I smell it (which is every morning). It is a lot of rose, a little bit of black pepper, a little bit of vanilla and probably a hundred other things. O, do I love it! Thank goodness for the French, eh? Now, I am not going to tell you what it is, not because I want to maintain a currently non-existent mystique, but because I want you to do something for me.

I get my bottle of olfactory heaven every year at a lovely little store on 1st avenue called Parfumerie Nasreen. If you have not already found the perfect potion for yourself, I suggest that you hie yourself to Nasreen as fast as your legs can carry you. She has an alarmingly extensive collection of perfumes from around the world, but even better than that, she seems to know all about each one. I do not doubt that you could go in to her shop, explain what kind of person you see yourself as, and she would be able to pull half a dozen bottles from the shelf that were just right for you. And even if she couldn’t, she has to be the most charming, relaxed, and elegant saleswoman this side of Manhattan. Well, and I love her because she carries large bottles of my favorite, even when its popularity doesn’t warrant any such thing. Bless her heart.

Shining Through

2004-09-07T23:26:00.000-07:00

By Susan Isaacs

I will be the first to admit that there are pieces of pop literature that have more than earned the title of “trash.” In fact, these ugly specimens litter the shelves of bookstores and libraries. Absolutely free of merit and lacking in style, they ruin it for the rest of us. Because, heaven knows there are times when we just want something that will entertain us, that will sweep us away from a world that is increasingly perplexing and upsetting, but we definitely don’t want a lobotomy along with our escape, now do we? Well, thank goodness for Susan Isaacs! The pleasantly sarcastic and self-deprecating voice of her narrator is like that of the friend you wish you had, slightly more interesting, slightly more funny, and in this case, living a much more hair-raising life than you could ever imagine for yourself.

For those who didn’t catch the movie (and believe me, don’t bother, the book is so much better), ‘Shining Through’ follows the life of Linda Voss, a Brooklyn-born legal secretary whose life is thrown out of its expected track by World War II and by her love for a beautiful, upper-class lawyer. While this may sound like a routine example of contemporary “women’s fiction,” in Isaacs’ capable hands the book transcends any genre to which you might care to assign it.

Linda Voss is a very sympathetic character; one who carries us very naturally through the events that lead up to her becoming a spy in Nazi Germany. Everything she relates is razor-sharp and at the same time vulnerable, and I can’t see how her story could possibly be of interest to only half of the population simply because of her gender. If anything, it is a story about you or I, or any ordinary person faced with extraordinary times. Linda Voss isn’t James Bond, some cool, extraordinarily well-trained and almost paranormal person, she is an average American who, when faced with the question, “What would you do if?” responds with a vigorous refusal to sit by and let bad things happen without doing what she can to stop them. Her choices make great fiction, a fun read, but they are also believable. You can almost imagine yourself responding in the same way, and you connect with her as if she were relating her tale to you over coffee in your own living room.

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Zero Effect (1998)

2004-09-05T01:13:00.000-07:00

Jake Kasdan, Director

It is well-nigh impossible to accurately pinpoint what is so amazing about Zero Effect. It isn't any one thing that makes it funnier, smarter, more interesting than other caper or detective movies. Each detail fits with all the others, sliding in to the larger picture with the satisfying "snick" of a puzzle piece clicking in to place.

Or maybe I am saying that wrong. It is not as if the characters and their setting blend in with one another, or are indistinguishable, because there are definitely some oddball people and places in the film. The "Zero" of Zero Effect, for instance, is Daryl Zero, the most talented, and surely the most incredibly odd detective known to pop culture. He is played by another odd and talented gentleman, the sorely overlooked Bill Pullman. To give you an idea of the way Pullman shines in this role, I will tell you that Ben Stiller and Ryan O'Neal seem faded and ordinary by comparison, even though both of them pull off strange and hilarious and effecting characters with aplomb. And they all have been handed dozens of pitch-perfect lines, calculated to make you say "what?" at the same time you are laughing so hard you are in danger of falling out of your chair.

When it isn't making you cry with laughter, Zero Effect is decidedly relaxed and assured for a caper film; it doesn't exactly have any heart-racing suspense, but there is a great deal of real mystery. Throughout the film, the viewer is often wondering just how much each character knows about all the others. They carry on ordinary-seeming (well, unusually clever, but otherwise ordinary) conversations while you are left watching their every tick, saying to yourself, "Does she know who he REALLY is? Is that guy just toying with the other one?" The film manages to keep you guessing even after the detective-puzzle has ostensibly been solved. It is a clever trick, to leave you hungry for answers at that same time the film gives you the satisfaction of wrapping up all the loose ends. Perhaps that answers the question, "Why don't I ever seem to tire of this movie, even though I have seen it at least 20 times???"

In Praise of Smut

2004-09-03T02:02:00.000-07:00

When I say “smut,” I do not mean pornographic movies. I have tried and tried to enjoy them, like the open-minded girl I really am, but I just never could. They are mechanical and predictable, with a complete lack of understanding about what is truly sexy (at least to me), and usually featuring positions designed for maximum camera angle and what seems like minimum pleasure. Yuk. And contrary to all of my (and Good Vibrations’) hopes, the ones directed or produced by women are not really any sexier than the outright exploitive films of the traditional porn industry. None of them are really free of the taint of exploitation, in any case. Even if I did find them more interesting than I actually do, it would be hard for me to love something about which I feel so deeply ambivalent.

Sexy books, on the other hand, are a completely different and almost entirely unrelated matter. The mind is where sex really happens, anyway. You can create desire by yourself, alone, using nothing but your imagination. You know it’s true. Just think about um…Nicholas Cage sweeping Cher off her feet in ‘Moonstruck,’ and presto! I don’t know what the utility of this gift is, in the grander scheme of things, but it is why, for me, sexy books have always been hotter than sexy movies. Out in the world, there is only so much that is possible, your inhibitions, social status, physical limitations preclude you from trying absolutely everything life has to offer, but up in the privacy of your head, anything is possible and indeed, permissible. If you can travel to Italy via Marlena De Blasi’s ‘1000 Days in Venice,’ then you can travel to some other person’s sex life in Anais Nin’s ‘Little Birds’ or Pauline Reage’s ‘Story of O.’

Now, I won’t even bother to claim that erotic writing is without its fair share of dreck, but there is a long and glorious tradition of sex writing that is honestly inquisitive and often beautiful. By inquisitive, I mean, that the authors aren’t just trying to be thrilling, they are trying to explore who we are as people and how sex fits in to our humanity, at the same time that they are turning us on. This writing is not afraid to be crude or explicit, but it is not meaningless, and should not be relegated to bathroom drawers, basement closets or the back of the store. Well, it’s just my opinion, but we should be reveling in the fun it can bring us, the glimpse it can give us of other worlds and other peoples’ fantastical experiences and dreams.

Sunshine

2004-09-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

By Robin McKinley

Whenever I think that surely a new way to write about vampires cannot be found, someone pops up and surprises me with a completely new take on the archetype. This particular book is a surprise in more ways than one. It is—for instance—a startling new direction for McKinley, who has perfected the tough-minded heroine in her re-workings of fairy tales, but whose stories have never been set in any time or place that seems as contemporary or harsh as this one is. Not that she seems out of her element. McKinley, while dealing freely in many of the tropes of fairy tale, such as magic, doomed princesses, animal companions and true love, has never gone much for the cutie-pie style of some fantasists. One of her major strengths as a writer is that she is able to create characters who fit seamlessly in to unlikely situations while at the same time seeming not unlike you or me. You read her books, and think, “Gosh, if I were captured by a Bedouin king and offered the chance to fight with his people against a magical menace, I might respond in just that way!” ‘Sunshine’ is no exception.

The world of ‘Sunshine’ seems a bit like our own, but for a couple of details. Namely, that magic seems to work in the world of the book, that magical creatures such as demons and vampires exist openly within it and that there seems to have recently been some sort of near-apocalyptic war involving both magic and magical creatures. This all sounds fairly outrageous, but again, McKinley’s narrator treats it very matter-of-factly, and you find yourself doing the same right along with her. Sunshine (for that is her name), is a very talented baker (yes, that’s right, she bakes bread and cinnamon rolls for a living), who immediately gets in to a curious situation involving rival vampires. She inadvertently rescues one, even though she starts the book explaining that the vampires of her world are the worst kind of evil, definitely not rock-star sexy like in the Anne Rice books, and she and we spend the rest of the book dealing with the aftermath of that decision.

There are so many wonderful things about this book, it is actually one of the rare novels that I just read the last page of, turned over and started again from the beginning. McKinley is one of very few authors whose work I can always count on to be freshly wonderful even after countless re-readings, and she doesn’t do re-treads; every new book has different ideas, new images, interestingly articulated relationships and heroines whose gifts are varied and fantastical. This particular book is the sexiest and most contemporary of hers, and for that reason, it might be a good introduction for those who don’t ordinarily go gaga over fantasy novels. In my opinion, everyone should at least TRY just one of her books, before dismissing them. They are some of the best fiction of any genre that the English language has to offer.

Find this book at Powell's

Cynthia Mazzara - my mom, the artist

2004-08-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

My mother, Cynthia Mazzara, is an alarmingly talented artist. She has waited a long time to pursue her dream of painting nearly-full-time, and I am pleased to see the result of her realization of that dream.

Her work is inspired by the Abstract Expressionists, such as Georgia O'Keefe and by Cezanne, but it is not derivative of those painters. Her beautiful pieces often focus on one subject, bringing your eye into a butterfly's-view of a leaf or spider mum flower, but they are more about feelings or impressions of colors than they are about "things." A red tree will give one an intense impression of the joy of color, or of autumn. An aggressive black bird will explode on to your eye with feelings of energy and almost-anger. A colorful leaf will bring you back into calm and contemplation of beauty.

Formally trained at Dunbarton College and American University, Mazzara used to fill our house with more traditional-seeming portraits and still lifes. She has always had an original style, but I am glad to see her find a fresh, new painter's "voice" that is all her own.

(Cynthia Mazzara's paintings will be visiting Victrola Coffee and Art in September, 2004. Stop by and see them for yourself!)

Garden State (2004)

2004-08-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

Zach Braff, Director

Some movies take you out of yourself, blessed escapes that transport you instantly to Italy, outer space, a lifestyle of the rich and famous. And then there are those rare films that snap you in to your most private self with a jolt of startled recognition. Garden State did that for me. As most of you have probably gathered from previous comments, I had a mildly strange youth, broken up with several bouts of severe depression. There were definitely moments where I felt deeply perplexed about why I was even alive, which were further exacerbated by some poor personal choices. Then one day, and it really was just one day, I looked around and the air was sweet and the sky was beautiful and I just decided that this was it. This was my life, it was the only one I was going to get, and I was--damn it all--going to enjoy every minute of it if I could. Since then, I have been sad, but I have never again felt that peculiar grey blankness of my teen years.

The reason I mention this is that Garden State is about that exact kind of moment. Zach Braff has managed to visually articulate an epiphany of sorts in a way that is unique to him, but echoes feelings that I actually experienced. Every detail of the film is a delightful surprise, each image is full of strange and beautiful details that I didn't anticipate and could only marvel at, but its core is and feels completely real and completely recognizeable. It is funny without having to reach for jokes, instead using what is genuine about its characters and setting to create humor. It is gorgeous, but not artificial. The camera frames things that are naturally lovely--the greenery of New Jersey, Natalie Portman's smile--in ways that show them off to their best advantage, but don't overly embellish upon what is already there. The film is strange the way people are strange, showing everyone's quirks and weaknesses, but not commenting upon or exaggerating them for the sake of being odd.

Garden State, for all its many gifts, is getting decidedly tepid reviews almost everywhere. After seeing it twice, and loving everything about it, I have decided that critics are responding negatively to the very vulnerability that makes it great. Raw, earnest emotion is often an uncomfortable thing to watch, even as it is the source of most of the pleasure afforded us. Garden State lays its heart on its proverbial sleeve, where many people might wish that it had retreated in to sarcasm or "coolness." It is enough to make most people squirm a bit (even me). The film lets you eavesdrop upon things that you are accustomed to think of as deeply private. It is a beautiful thing to watch, but not always a comfortable one. Don't let that stop you!

In Praise of Solitude

2004-08-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

I love to take a novel to a fancy restaurant and eat good food in lonely splendor. One of the more interesting side effects of eating alone is what I like to call "pity service." Waitstaff everywhere rush to fill your every need, possibly thinking to themselves, "The poor dear! She has no one to have dinner with on a Friday night, let's refill her water glass!" While I appreciate the bonus service, I snicker behind my paperback at the pity. I have always loved my time alone. I grew up in VERY small apartment, where I shared a room with my brother, and every silent moment was a little gift. Every one of you knows I am a reader, and I learned to concentrate on my books so well that I could drown out playing, shouting, music, television and questions, but I definitely treasure the times when I don't have to do any such thing.

In fact, I find that when I don't get enough time to myself, I start to feel ragged around the edges. I can't hear my own thoughts, and lose track of my best self. In the silence of an empty house, it's as if the problems of the week resolve themselves, have time to unravel in my head without direct assistance from me. When I fail to give myself the space, they just coil tighter and tighter, so that by the next time I look around I can hardly figure out why I am such a mess. I wonder sometimes at friends of mine who fill every second of their day with entertainment of some kind, or social contact; I would go crazy after a week or so of that. You would find me gibbering in a corner, biting my nails and talking to myself.

Sometimes I think about this, and I look around me at everyone moving so fast, and watching so much TV, and playing so many games, and I wonder how many of our troubles are self-created. What would we get out of just a few more hours of quiet than we already have? Even small children get nap time, and whole countries all over the world traditionally take a siesta in the afternoon. What are we losing when we fail to stop and let ourselves think for a second?

In Praise of Lois McMaster Bujold

2004-08-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

Anything at all by Lois McMaster Bujold

I have elsewhere praised Bujold, but I am currently re-reading everything of hers that isn't packed away in a box, am impressed anew at her talent and want to further elaborate on my rabid affection for her work. Justly famous for a constantly evolving series of "Space Operas" which detail the adventures of a physically handicapped, but hyperactively brilliant military commander named Miles Vorkosigan, Bujold has also successfully dabbled in fantasy (always a difficult transition, see CJ Cherryh for how far it can go wrong). Neither genre seems quite big enough to hold her, or hold her back. She is perfectly capable of creating outrageous space battles, describing the science of wormholes, and making her readers laugh until they cry, all at the same time. Her books have a depth that much genre fiction is frankly missing, partially due to the fact that she is brilliant at creating original characters, and she never leads those characters around in order to accomplish her plot. Quite the reverse. You can't imagine, after "meeting" him, anyone else but Miles doing the things that he does or getting in to the messes that he creates. His personality--which feels vividly genuine to the reader--drives his adventures, and oh, what adventures they are!

Bujold is the reigning Queen of the "series." She has created a world and characters that are instantly recognizeable as hers, and she is careful to keep Miles' timeline straight in her own head, but the reader doesn't have to bother to know anything about the order of the books, because each one stands on its own as a good read. I encountered them all out of order the first time, re-read them in chronological order, and am now picking which one to read next by topic-association. It really doesn't matter, they are blissfully fun in whatever order, and all unobtrusively sprinkled with hints for the newcomer. I guess what I am trying to say is: since she makes her books so easy to slip in to, I don't see why everyone shouldn't just go ahead and give her a try.

(If you absolutely must begin at the beginning of Miles, start with his parents in 'Cordelia's Honor.')

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

2004-08-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

John Cameron Mitchell, Director

I was going to make this week's movie an action movie, or some type of dark, scary mystery, simply because I have been hammering the romantic movie theme in to the ground, but I find that I have just one more to praise before I can move on to Ronin or The Usual Suspects or whatever. This one isn't exactly a love story, but it is about love, identity, and how the two are often intertwined. I have more than once heard Hedwig described as the Rocky Horror Picture Show for my generation, and though I have previously professed an embarrassed affection for the excesses of Rocky Horror, I think this comparison is unfair to John Cameron Mitchell's achievement.

Rocky Horror Picture Show is aggressively odd, by which I mean that it is trying very hard to be perverse and alien, and is occasionally off-putting even to long-time fans such as myself. Hedwig and the Angry Inch pulls off a completely opposite trick, which is to portray a person whose life the mythical "average viewer" might have a hard time sympathizing with, and then use her troubles to convey something meaningful about being a human. Hedwig strikes me as something that, while referencing cultural details from a specific time and place, will retain its relevance long after its creator is dust-and-ashes. It rings true. Mitchell-as-Hedwig describes her childhood, the reasons for her sex change, and her intense love for a young musical protege named Tommy Gnosis in a tone that is wry, self-deprecating and passionate at the same time. There are some moments that had me laughing until I was hiccuping, which are followed by thoughtful peregrinations on a variety of topics. The live action is bracketed with charmingly animated shorts on Hedwig's childhood and the "Origin of Love."

And let's not forget this is a rock musical. How can I express the exhiliration I feel every time I hear the songs from Hedwig? They are just SO GOOD! They perfectly illustrate key points of the movie, and somehow manage to be rough, raucous and to convey vulnerability, all at the same time. The music is a seamless part of the film, which isn't always the case with musicals. Which is not to say that Hedwig is smooth or polished. It is chaotic, messy, energetic, and colorful, not manicured and careful, as befits a musical about a love-lorn, German, transsexual rock singer chasing a teenage star around the country, headlining in diners to make a living. Who would want it any other way?

In Praise of Cabrales Flan

2004-08-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

Tucked in between the Seattle neighborhoods of Wallingford and Greenlake is the small stretch of cafes, restaurants and random businesses that people are starting to call "Tangletown." It is N 56th St, bounded by Latona on one end and Meridian on the other. Anyone who has done any driving in that neighborhood will understand the moniker, as it is full of streets that start out in one direction and end up going another. Even the locals get lost from time to time. I guarantee it is worth the confusion if you can make it to a table at the casual-but-delightful restaurant on the corner, called Eva. With a dining room ringed by many-paned, wood-framed windows and grape vines, a wine bar, and cuisine heavily influenced by the Mediterranean, Eva is a charming, unusually high quality neighborhood spot. The prices are not so outrageous you would feel terrible stopping in for dinner after work, but the food is wonderful enough to rate a special occasion. Eva has a full bar, and is home to one of my favorite champagne cocktails, whose ingredients I am completely forgetting, but which smells a bit like roses and tastes divine.

These things were enough by themselves to coax us there from Capitol Hill, but the true cherry on the sundae is the Cabrales Flan appetizer. Cabrales is a delectable Spanish blue, with a taste and texture mildly reminiscent of Roquefort. The chef at Eva, Amy McCray, has whipped her Cabrales up into a fluffy, tangy, savoury flan and served it with a chutney and some crumbly cracker. I can't enough praise this dish, it is outrageously good. It melts immediately upon contact with your tongue, leaving behind a slightly sweet, slightly salty, all-delicious flavor. Every component is perfectly in harmony with the rest. It also tickles my tastebuds because it reminds me of something we had in Italy, but even with the nostalgia factor removed, it is one of my favorite things to eat in this town. Last time we were at Eva, we shared one, and I ate a second one for dinner! Definitely try it with a champagne cocktail.

Soundtrack to 'Blankets'

2004-08-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a mini-review for the book's soundtrack...From the lovely and talented Tizzy Asher.

And, for those who can't live without an augmented, multi-media experience, check out the soundtrack to Blankets on Film Guerrero Records. Thompson himself solicited the Portland band Tracker, and the group has created an instrumental backdrop designed to accompany the novel, and it explores Thompson use of contrasts between white space and intricate, inspiralled lines (or, in this case, notes) to demonstrate the moral quandries of his protagonist. A healthy dose of skepticism should accompany any band that attempts to make a soundtrack for a novel as elloquent as Blankets, but Tracker succeeds by aspiring to remain in the background.

And, the artwork for the record includes new illustrations.

Blankets

2004-08-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

by Craig Thompson

Not all comix are created equal, and wouldn't it be a crying shame if they were. I certainly can't think of a correlative to this superb and almost painfully honest autobiographical graphic novel. Thompson has garnered so much praise for this work, I almost feel foolish adding my own, but I did want to say one thing. There are other artists out there who can create beauty and humor with pen-and-ink, but 'Blankets' is unusual in my experience of comix and contemporary literature. It is completely raw, lacking in the tone of distancing irony that often plagues "hip" art. The character of Craig is troubled by the petty cruelties of his family, by his feelings for the church and by his growing love for Raina, and he isn't ashamed to show us. It is refreshing to see the inner thoughts of anyone, seemingly unmediated by self-conciousness, but our narrator isn't just anyone. The Craig Thompson of the book is deeply devout, but questioning his faith; he is sensitive to the nuances of his world, but surrounded by those who are not. He is a singular character in his small Wisconsin town. The Craig Thompson who created the book conveys all of this flawlessly and beautifully. For me, who grew up in a big city on the "Left Coast," it was like stepping into a completely different world, complete with a sympathetic guide to show me the differences and the similarities between my life and his own.

Find this book at Powell's

Clueless (1995)

2004-08-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

Amy Heckerling, Director

It may come as a surprise to anyone who didn't know me at the time, but college was not a great time for me. By my junior year, a series of disastrously ill-advised romantic adventures had left me with ulcers, suicidal tendencies and recurring panic attacks. I didn't get to class much, but that's okay because I wasn't having any fun either! How, you might be wondering, did I pull out of my funk long enough to graduate? Well, you can lay the responsibility for that miracle at the feet of Amy Heckerling's gloriously cheerful interpretation of Jane Austen's Emma.

Primarily famous for reinvigorating interest in valley-speak, and often described as "Jane Austen meets Beverly Hills 90210," the film isn't as fluffy as it first appears to be. It revels in Beverly Hills excess, but only with tongue firmly planted in cheek. It pokes fun at the native language of Southern California, but only while poking fun at those who think that planting the word "like" in between phrases is an indicator of low IQ. It is about the most popular, rich, self-involved girl in town, but she definitely isn't who you think she is. Alicia Silverstone and Amy Heckerling pull off a magic trick of sorts, displaying all of the stereotypical traits of the spoiled Cali-girl, and turning them into something endearing, innocent, and kind-hearted.

There is a sense in which this is having your cake and eating it, too. You get all the outrageous excesses, all the color, all the ridiculous rich-and-famous-ness of LA AND you get to make fun of it AND you get a big-hearted character to love and root for. I can't imagine anything better. The film does everything right, and it is a guilt-free, honestly feel-good treat, guaranteed to perk you up.

Which is precisely why I had it on a loop in my house for months. I would even go so far as to say that Clueless saved my life. I can't promise you the same, but I can say that it is wonderful fun, that it is completely hilarious, and that it won't insult your intelligence. What more can you possibly need?

In Praise of Lagavulin

2004-08-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

I guess I just like for my alcohol to taste like something, because vodka has never really appealed to me. I like my gin to have all 500 botanicals, and my scotch to taste as if it had just been a stream running over peat in the Scottish Highlands. Which is why I love Lagavulin. It is an Islay Single Malt Whiskey, and it tastes like one. There is a whole world waiting in your glass when you drink Lagavulin; it is like inhaling a country, a culture, a romance of rustic life. You can smell smoke, peat, earth and grass. It is sweet and sharp to the taste. If you close your eyes, you can see rolling green hills, pierced with gray stone, and dotted with little crofter's cottages complete with sheep. Clouds obscure the sun, and the wind is cold, but you are warm and safe, enlivened by your little glass of whiskey. It can come as quite a shock to open your eyes to a Belltown bar full of cell phones, tanned skin and high heels. There aren't many things that are so full of character as to pull you out of the world you inhabit. For me, the smell of certain wines will do it, or cocoa butter suntan lotion, or--every once and a while--, the way sunlight hits the side of a building will give me an instant feeling that I am not where I thought I was. Whatever causes that feeling, it is pure magic to me. For that reason, I would love Lagavulin even if it didn't taste and smell incredible: just for the spell it can cast.

In Praise of the Space Opera

2004-08-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

This last century saw the introduction of a glorious new form of entertainment: the space opera. Epitomized by such works as Star Wars, Star Trek and Dune, the genre has blossomed into countless books and movies. The quality of these pieces is--as you may have guessed--all over the map, and the futures they portray are often wildly unlike one another, but they all share certain things in common. The name "space opera" might clue you in to what those things are. None of them are set on Earth, of course, but also and almost always, at least part of the action takes place on space stations or ships, not just distant planets. Part of the appeal of the space opera is the vicarious experience it gives of an environment that is alien and mechanized, but that seems almost accessible in this day and age. We can see footage here at home of people actually living on space stations, or floating in zero gravity on manned flights to the moon, and we can live it through the eyes of the characters in Star Wars or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It is an unexpectedly addictive experience. Once you get a taste for the genre, it is hard to shake. There is just something inherently inspiring about the idea of flying to the stars.

There are those authors who capitalize upon this fascination, and who don't bother to give their readers anything more than a bit of flying around in a tin can, but most practitioners stay true to the "opera" part of the moniker. Expect a good example of the genre to contain drama of epic proportions, at least one intrepid hero, and more than a few space battles. The fact that the stories are set in outer space seems to free their creators from ordinary constraints, as if without gravity their characters often don't have to conform to earthly standards of behavior. Even the gloomiest space opera is wild, free-wheeling and full of cheerfully chaotic activity.

There are dozens of excellent examples of this form of literature, I am certainly not going to be able to list them all here, but these are a few of my favorites:

Cyteen and Hellburner by C.J. Cherryh

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Anything at all written by Lois McMaster Bujold

The "Gap" series by Stephen R. Donaldson (not for the faint of heart)

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

State and Main (2000)

2004-08-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

David Mamet, Director

'State and Main' takes a rapier to the pretensions of Hollywood, and in trademark Mamet style, the stabs are ruthless, fast and funny. David Mamet is so famously the master of highly-stylized and clever dialogue, that I am not going to bother adding to the mountain of praise he has received on that score. And, If you know anything about Mamet, I won't even need to tell you about the outrageous and convoluted contretemps into which this film places its characters.

However, you may be surprised to hear that what stands out in 'State and Main' is the love story. Those of you who are wondering if someone like Mamet can pull off a romance, should remember what he specializes in: movies about complex confidence schemes. What is a good con, if it is not a seduction? Forget 'Glengarry Glen Ross' for a second, and think back to 'House of Games' and 'The Spanish Prisoner.' A good con is predicated on the swindler's ability to charm his mark, to inspire trust and affection, and a good con movie depends on the film maker's ability to charm the viewer into forgetting that she is watching a swindler at work. Mamet is a genius at this card trick. He portrays the snake-charmer of a con man, shows all of the details you need to figure out the scam, and distracts you just enough that you don't see it coming.

What does this have to do with love? Well, remove the shady motives, the dishonesty and the money from a con, and what you have left is the courtship. It is the same delicate dance, and is equally well-oiled with clever words, small gifts and gestures of faith. This is what Mamet has given us in 'State and Main.' Playing counterpoint to the brittle artificiality of almost everyone else in the movie, is possibly the sweetest, freshest courtship ever caught on film. It is played out over a relatively few scenes, but breathes life in to the entire film. Watching this unfold from the beginning is so pleasurable to watch, that I am not going to tell you a single detail. It was a surprise to me, even down to the choice of actor/character, and that was part of the fun. If you want to know more, you are just going to have to rent it.

There is so much to enjoy in the film, you probably won't regret the time spent. The side plots abound, there are plenty of chuckles, and some very funny cameos. Check out the magician Ricky Jay, here playing the father of a teenage seductress, and Alec Baldwin's hilarious job spoofing himself.

In Praise of 727 Pine

2004-07-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

I love fancy hotels. I love hotel lobbies, which always have comfortable chairs, are open 24 hours and frequently have snazzy bathrooms. I love the fact that good hotels need to keep their fancy-shmancy restaurants open all year round to keep their rating, even though they are completely empty once the tourists go home. I love the fact that hotels always, always have a well-stocked, romantically sleazy bar on site. There are several lovely hotel lounges in town, with luscious drinks, comfy sofas and good food (The Georgian at the Fairmont Olympic is by far the prettiest), but the best deal I've seen yet is happy hour at 727 Pine, the restaurant attached to the Grand Hyatt Seattle. The prices aren't ridiculously low, but the quality is ridiculously high. They have a small-but-delicious bar menu that is half price from 4-7pm every night, cheap drinks and signature infusions (my favorite is the Manhattan made with cherry-infused bourbon), but the best part is that you can sit in the bar, have your happy hour drinks AND pick decadent creations from the restaurant kitchen to mix with your lamb burgers and french fries. We haven't actually had a full dinner there yet, but have made some very interesting sampling tables by picking and choosing between the haute cuisine of the dinner menu and the bar food. Yum! Your guess is as good as mine why this place is half-empty all the time, but it is. We love to walk in on rainy weeknights, fold ourselves into one of the funky 40s-inspired booths and stay all evening. You should try it...

Mortal Love

2004-07-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

by Elizabeth Hand

This weekend, I took a break from my current obssession--books on books--to read this hybrid of a horror novel, romance and fairy tale. I just discovered Elizabeth Hand last week, and I am glad that I did. It is not often that one comes across an author whose books are so odd, yet so enjoyable. She is shelved in fantasy, but unlike so many genre authors, she cannot really be put in to a pigeonhole. I have only read three of her books, but they are each as unlike one another as it is possible for books by the same person to be. The first--called Winterlong-- is science fiction, set in a Washington, DC of the far future that is decayed, decadent and essentially abandoned by civilization. The next one I encountered drew upon the work of the anthropologists and historians who have cataloged the rise and fall of goddess-worshipping cultures throughout human history, and distilled that knowledge into a mystery/fantasy that speculates on what would happen to our civilization if those cultures were to be grafted on to it.

Mortal Love is Hand's newest book, and it draws inspiration from fairy tales, and the art and poetry of the Romantics. The narrative jumps between three characters living in different times. Hand lays clues to her puzzle by highlighting the similarities in their experience of love and art, and in their infatuation for a mysterious woman who seems ageless--enticing and inspiring artists from the 16th century to our own. After reading the whole thing, I would say that reading it is like experiencing a fairy tale as an outsider to the central action. Which is not to say that there isn't action in the book and plenty of it, but more that the book does a convincing job of articulating what it would be like for an ordinary human who is caught in the train of strange and magical events. The reader gets hints of the bigger picture, and is privy to some very real havoc in the world of the book, but it isn't obvious what is causing that havoc. What is fascinating to me is how fresh and new the book feels, considering the age of some of its source material. Thus does Hand create a real puzzle for the reader, by turning an archetypal tale inside out.

Find this book at Powell's

Sports Night (1998-2000)

2004-07-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

Aaron Sorkin, Creator

I don't think very many people remember the ads for Sports Night, but the one that caught my attention was a simple-but-brilliant billboard. It contained a photo of the cast, the title, and the following slogan: "This show is about sports the way Charlie's Angels is about law enforcement." This is the only time in my life that I can recall my behavior being positively influenced by an ad campaign. Weeks later, we ran across the show while looking for something else, and I was just curious enough to leave it running, even in the face of my customary distaste for sitcoms. The rest is history...No, but really, it didn't take more than 2 minutes to turn me into a raving-lunatic-fan.

Sports Night isn't really about sports. It is about a sports show called Sports Night and about the people who write, produce and present that show. It is tangentially about the love of sports, and on a deeper level, about what it is like to work somewhere that inspires you, doing something that you love, and surrounded by people who care about you.

Anyone familiar with Aaron Sorkin won't need to be told that this show is a word-lover's wit-fest. In one of the West Wing DVD special features, either Sorkin or one of his collaborators explains that he (Sorkin) uses dialogue the way a composer would use music. He isn't satisfied with simply communicating a concept, the words themselves must sound interesting, have a rhythm and a flow. Whatever Sorkin's method, he is a genius at this. He has a one-of-a-kind ear for snappy, memorable dialogue. I haven't seen a single thing written by him from which I didn't walk away quoting lines (and laughing hysterically). Sports Night is one of his lightest creations, and the quips are frequent, fresh and often sweet. His actors never miss a beat, and are capable of infusing Sorkin's words with their own singular qualities.

The group of actors are a television dream, headed up by Robert Guillaume, reprising his customary role as the gentleman snark. He is joined by an alarmingly talented, attractive and charming cast, packed with comic geniuses. Fans of West Wing or any of Sorkin's movies, will recognize at least a few of the secondary characters, and film buffs everywhere will marvel at the talent he was able to cajole into working on what is essentially a sitcom. I am not going to list them all here, but I wanted to give special mention to Josh Charles, who you may remember laying his heart on the line for a beautiful girl in Dead Poet's Society. He has grown up since then, but hasn't grown out of his unusual brand of charm and open-heartedness. He is perfect for Sorkin's dialogue, and is able to make it sound like an effortless extension of his personality. Someone should get that boy a starring role in a GOOD movie! (AND include Sabrina Lloyd and Joshua Malina?)

Okay, anyway...

If you are like many people I have spoken with, you may be asking yourself why, if this show was so good, you've never seen it or heard of it. I ask myself that question all the time! Sports Night only lasted two seasons, and never really found its audience. ABC kept moving it around on the calendar, it didn't seem as if they really knew what to do with it. It's a crying shame, in my opinion, even if the cancellation did allow Sorkin to devote all his energy to the equally brilliant West Wing. There are things about Sports Night with which even West Wing can't compete. Happily for us fanatics, the entire thing is available on DVD, but I still get sad when the last episode wraps up and I know I am not going to be hearing the rest of the story.

In Praise of the Salwar Kameez

2004-07-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I have a long-standing, but essentially shallow fixation with some parts of the culture of India. Namely, the movies, the language, the food and the clothes. My interest in India is a lot like my interest in France, mainly food, language and fashion-related; I don't claim to know a thing about what it is like in India economically, politically, etc. Somebody recently asked me where this curiosity came from, and I have to say that I am not entirely sure. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was the following things: one, my mother has been fascinated by the country since before I was born, although she has never been there. Two, a lot of the family chaos portrayed in Hindi films reminds me somewhat of my extended family (Italian in this case). Three, I discovered said Hindi films, and the outrageously bright and beautiful colors of Bollywood at a time when the prevailing fashion here in the States was for tan, white, black and gray-colored things (Blech!).

Now, I must say that I have always felt a bit awkward about adopting the cultural trappings of another country without knowing everything I can about that country. Part of this squeamishness comes from years of witnessing the terrible tendency in fellow Evergreen students for borrowing bits and pieces from cultures around the world without knowing what they meant. By the time I left there, I was about ready to "shoot first and ask questions later" whenever I heard rich-white-boy-number-ten-thousand call himself a "shaman."

When it comes to the Salwar Kameez, however, my admiration is more than adequate to overcome my hesitation. What can you say about an outfit that comes with its own accessories, looks good on everyone regardless of body type, is appropriate for very casual occasions and very formal ones, and feels cool in the summer and warm and cozy in the winter? It's gorgeous, saves the wearer from having to pick something that "goes" with it, is comfortable, and comes in an alarming variety of colors, fabrics and styles. I guess my real question is: why doesn't everyone wear something like this every day?

There is a sense in which "everyone" does wear something like this, or at least a large percentage of the world's population has access to some form of this dress: the iconic suit of East Asia, with toggle-button jacket and loose pants is a variation, and the Salwar Kameez itself (under a variety of names) is worn in India, Pakistan, the Middle East (where it most likely originated in Persia, although don't quote me on that) and Africa. Here in the United States, and, in fact, all over Europe, and North and South America, multitudes of people from any of the above-listed locations have brought this practical and beautiful form of dress with them. What I am still waiting for is the moment it catches on in the larger population here, so that I can get mine at my local clothing store, instead of having to drive to British Columbia, or Kent, WA or have total strangers pick my clothes for me when they visit India (thank you, Anandhi's husband!). When, oh when is that day going to come? It may never, but I honestly don't see why...

The Norton Anthology of Poetry

2004-07-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Edited by Margaret Ferguson, et al.

I am not generally interested in browsing desultorily through books, reading a passage here or a page there. Most of the time, I won't even bother with a book unless I know that will keep me interested all the way through to the end, but every once in a while, I don't have the energy or the stamina to start a new project. When that happens, I find that it helps to already have a book around the house that responds well to random perusal. Mostly because, if I can't be bothered to start a new book, I also can't be bothered to find a new book; if things are that bad, I usually don't even want to leave the house! On days like these, I turn to books like The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves, "Gah! Poetry!" Well, I say, "What could be better?" Poems (of the type found in an anthology) are usually short, usually about one complete subject, full of images and interesting language; they have been written on an alarming array of topics and in a bewildering range of styles. There should be at least one poem that appeals to everyone, and they are a perfect thing to polish off on a sluggish Sunday afternoon.

What I like about the Norton Anthology in particular is its scope. Don't like the Metaphysical Poets? Well, how about the Beats? Can't stand Auden? Well, try Coleridge! Though still limited by its charter to English poetry, in recent years the collection has even cleaned up its act a bit in the inclusion department. The most recent edition includes a decent sampling of poems by women, by poets of a race other than Caucasian and those from countries other than England or the United States.

The book is also satisfying as a physical object. It is heavy and substantial, and is one of those wondrous books where the pages lie flat without having to be held. The paper is delicate, but heavy enough to weigh itself down. In fact, this adds to its suitability as a browsing book, because if you stand the thing on its spine and let it go, it will open to something and stay there. Right just now, I tried this and got William Worsdworth's 'The Ruined Cottage.' Since I've never read that before, I think I will sign off to do so...

Find this book at Powell's

(There is also a shorter edition, for those who just can't imagine paying $70.00 for any book.)

De-Lovely (2004)

2004-07-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

Irwin Winkler, Director

De-Lovely is one of those rare creations that inspire absolute trust in the viewer (or at least, it did in this particular viewer). What I mean is, though you may at times cringe or cry at the unhappy choices of the characters, you will rest easy in the knowledge that the director knows what he is doing, and will not lead you or the film astray. I had no idea what a precious thing this was until I experienced it during the film. De-Lovely treats you like the adult that you are, one capable of comprehending difficult concepts, subtle shades of emotion and the choices of very singular people. It does not insult its audience by painting everything in Crayola colors, or whitewashing itself, or indulging in the all-too-popular vice of the over-explainer. At the same time, it isn't one of those cruel, completely opaque experimental films the understanding of which requires a mind like a computer and no heart. It is warm, frequently funny, and rascally-but-loveable.

Which characteristics make it quite a bit like its central character: Cole Porter. De-Lovely isn't so much a biography of Porter, as a collage of his songs that cleverly illustrates the finer points of his married life. Cole and Linda Porter had what would be called "a marriage of convenience", but for the fact that they obviously cared for one another. For those who don't know, one of Porter's salient characteristics as a husband was constant unfaithfulness driven by a life-long predeliction for beautiful men. The movie makes a bold attempt to articulate the balance--both for himself internally and for Linda Porter--between this profligacy and his professed love for his wife. It also has some things to say about the difference between agreeing to something difficult for yourself, as Linda agreed to live with Cole in a sexless marriage, and actually experiencing it day-by-day.

I don't have a clue how faithful this is to recorded history, but whatever the accuracy, it works on its own as a meditation regarding a particular kind of (mostly out-moded) relationship. What is still more unusual about this rendition, is that the screenwriter makes no attempt to ascribe contemporary attitudes to the characters. The movie feels unmistakeably like the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. The characters don't reflect on their lives based on any of the relevant political movements of the last half century. We as feminists or those living in an era profoundly changed by the Women's Movement and Gay Rights may watch what Cole and Linda did and cringe or feel frustration, but the characters themselves are blessedly allowed to behave as they would in the time. This adds immeasurably to your feeling of stepping into a different world. Needless to say, I haven't actually been to Paris in 1920-whatever or Hollywood in 1930-whatever, but the film gives me the impression that I have.

Of course, a fair amount of that feeling comes from the music. Cole Porter was the master of cleverly naughty lyrics, set to sprightly tunes that just get stuck in your head forever. To anyone who grew up on musicals as I did (or for that matter, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and basically any other famous jazz singer since), they absolutely typify Porter's era, and any nostalgia we have maintained about said era. I couldn't even begin to tell you how many movies, chanteuses, commercials and musicals have found a way to sneak a Cole Porter song into their repertoire, but the way De-Lovely uses his songs is distinctive. Their ordering works in such a way that Cole Porter seems to be literally writing the script of his own life. It's clever and refreshing, and forces you to actually listen to the old songs as if they were new ones. What more can you ask for in a film? If you are me, not much.

(For anyone interested in Cole Porter's music, I urge you to track down a wonderful compilation called Red, Hot & Blue. It was created as an AIDS benefit, and features numerous and unlikely contemporary bands covering his songs.)

In Praise of the Evergreen State College

2004-07-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know (I am not particularly shy about it), I received my undergraduate degree from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Many, many people enjoy teasing me about this in various ways, most of them involving reference to drum circles and excessive marijuana consumption. While I won't even bother to deny the fact that there are indeed drum circles, hippies and excessive amounts of marijuana at Evergreen, the teasers are definitely missing the point. I didn't exactly fit in at Evergreen, but I would happily kneel down and kiss the ground in gratitude that I went to college there instead of somewhere else. My family paid a couple of thousand dollars a year for me to receive a public education that is the equal of anything I could have received at the most prestigious private university. Furthermore, and ever more precious, Evergreen is a school whose stated goal is to teach its students how to think for themselves, not to teach them what to think about chosen topics. Last year, I wrote a review of a short book by one of the Evergreen faculty that basically sums up this philosophy and its effectiveness ('Teaching with Your Mouth Shut' by Don Finkel). I won't belabor the point here, except to say that I have spoken at length with a number of people about their college experiences and have never felt anything but satisfaction at how the intellectual rigor and inspiration-to-inquiry of my courses at Evergreen compares to that of similar courses at other colleges.

It may not shock anyone but me that this gem of a school must fight tooth-and-nail every single year to get and retain adequate funding from the state. The very things that contribute to Evergreen's success as an educational institution, also allow its students the freedom to do things that don't always make flattering news coverage, or encouraging examples for state politicians. This is, in my opinion, all to the good. It ends up functioning as an education in self-government, in the price of freedom, in the responsibilities of a good citizen, but while that education is taking place, it can lead to some interesting chaos, which is not always amenable to explanation via a television sound bite. The school battles a reputation that is strangely at odds with itself: on the one hand, it tests off the charts in student engagement and academic success, while on the other hand, the school struggles with the image of drugged-out hippies and drum circles. I say you can't have one without the other. In order to teach people to think, you have to give them the freedom to choose for themselves, and if that is true, then you must be prepared for some to choose a path that isn't the one you want for them. Anything else is tyranny masquerading as "responsibility." Please hold on while I kiss the ground in gratitude that Evergreen seems to understand this, and has worked tirelessly to leave these choices open to its students, occasionally at the risk of its own continued existence.

I accept the fact that my education was a gift to which not everyone has access, but they should. My dream universe has every school following Evergreen's model, or something like it. Until then, I tell every college-age person I know to give it a second look. You should be doing the same.

Entertaining

2004-07-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

by Martha Stewart

Whatever Martha Stewart's faults, and I am sure they are legion, I will say this for her: not only did she take housekeeping (ie, "women's work") and turn it into a multi-million dollar industry, she also knows how to make a fabulous coffee table book.

A book like Entertaining can be a source of frustration if you are actually trying to plan a party, as it assumes that we all have access to Depression Glassware and convection ovens, but when you are bored on a Sunday afternoon, and wanting something beautiful to perk you up, it is a winner. There are hundreds of gorgeous photographs of Martha's lovely china, her lovely gardens, her lovely table settings and her lovely food that she will serve to her lovely guests. If you don't happen to be a class warrior, this is a fun fairy-tale into which you can step.

I grew up in a house that was full of cookbooks, and one of the things my mother and I used to do together while my father cooked dinner, was pull out a pile of the ones with the best photographs and page through them. (There is something incredibly appealing about photographs of wonderful food, especially when you know that you will be tucking in to something wonderful yourself fairly soon.) This particular book was the source of hours of this kind of amusement over the years, and I still remember it fondly.

Find this book at Powell's

Brown Sugar (2002)

2004-07-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Rick Famuyiwa, Director

In a movie review I read last year (sorry, I can't remember who the reviewer was or what movie they were talking about), the writer suggested that one reason popular movies made by black directors were more interesting and original than their counterparts made by white directors was because the Hollywood establishment was less interested in expending time and money on so-called "Black Movies," and therefore the directors were inadvertently given more space to pursue their own ideas without the sticky fingers of movie executives or marketing directors messing with them. I am not sure what I think of this assertion, as it seems to commit the asserter to a number of highly dubious arguments, chief among them the idea that black directors should feel in some way fortunate that they are working in an industry that doesn't care about them or their culture, and furthermore that it is even possible to make sweeping generalizations about creative merit based on the race of the director.

Whatever the case, it IS actually true that this particular movie does have more warmth, sweetness and charm than other films in its genre. Compare it to a reasonable sample of romantic comedies from the same year or so, and you will see what I mean: 'The Wedding Planner' (Yuk!), 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 days' (double YUK!), 'Two Weeks Notice' (Yuk, only salvaged by the fact that Hugh Grant is simply brilliant at playing the cad, but where is the apostrophe?).

I think I have said before that one of my major gripes with romantic comedies lately is that they frequently don't bother to create a real connection between the two people who are supposedly so in love. They are often about couples who are physically attractive, but often quite alarmingly cruel to and dishonest with one another (see above). This movie doesn't break the bounds of the genre, it fits neatly into the romantic comedy slot in our brains, but it does an excellent job of making you understand why the two leads care about one another. It manages this in a sly way that uses the evolution of hip hop to explain the evolution of their feelings towards one another. The two meet on a New York street corner, while listening to a group of older kids beatboxing and rhyming, and their relationship develops, changes, and at one point stagnates with the growth and change and occasional stagnation of the music.

This also works as an energizing love letter to "real" as-in old-school hip hop. Almost everyone of a certain age who grew up in this country will find their own memories jogged by the soundtrack and by the images from the flashbacks. There are a bunch of “ah ha!” moments where the viewer is right with the couple as they reminisce, and many fans will sympathize with their nostalgia for the music they grew up with, and with their sadness at the many changes that commercialism has wrought upon it.

I will also say that it does not hurt the appeal of the movie that Taye Diggs is about the most attractive man in Hollywood (how can you not love that smile?), and Sanaa Lathan (though often typecast as something of a goody-girl) is wickedly adorable. You want to love them, and you want their relationship to work. Happily, this is a romantic comedy, and you know it will.

In Praise of Trivia

2004-07-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

What exactly is it about useless pieces of information that makes them so satisfying to collect? Is it because they don't weigh anything? Is it because they can be stored somewhere that doesn't take up valuable closet space? Is it because they are fun to take out and dust off and show around at parties? Is it because they can be endlessly rearranged, and are often a surprise gift popping up out of nowhere when you are doing something else? Who needs a mysteriously mislaid five dollar bill in the lining of their winter coat when they have the sure knowledge that twentieth-century Portugal's four greatest poets were all the same person, or that the Titanic ran aground in part because they mis-laid their shipment of spyglasses, tucked somewhere in the folds of their brain? I know I don't.

My father, who is a trivia collector himself, calls my brain "the rubbish bin," because I have an extensive and stunningly impractical collection of information packed up there, which refuses to be accessed in an organized way. I am sure that many people can sympathize with me when I tell them that I cannot always remember who the vice president is when asked, but that I will be bombarded from within by reams of information about, say, the making of the 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' whenever I see a photo of Tim Curry. There is something of a curse in all of this effusiveness, but I have no one to blame for it but myself. I labored joyfully and tirelessly to collect each and every last piece of that useless information, and many more besides. I spent 9 months as a teenager reading about nothing but King Arthur, followed by 1 year where I studied up on vampires, followed by 2 years where I read everything I could find on Mary Magdalen, who was supplanted in my affections by the Titanic, which sank under the weight of my adoration for the films of Hal Hartley, who somehow led me back to Grail Legends (Arthur again!) and on and on and on.

Many people have pointed out that if I would just STICK WITH SOMETHING, pick a subject for crying out loud, I would have a PhD by now. Though they may be right, I just can't do it. It is not scholarship that drives me, but an obssessive and overly emotional need to learn about just this one thing, right now, and for weeks until I'm exhausted by it and am inspired to move onto something else. I could no more stop myself from looking up every book on the 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' than an alcoholic could stop herself from having just one more little drink. (And people wonder how I became a smoker? No mystery there...) I tell you what, trivia has brought me more pleasure than it ever brought heartache, which is more than I can say about a lot of things. The only real drawback I can find (beyond the lack of a PhD in vampirology?), is for my family and friends. They have all-too-often become inadvertant "experts" themselves just by being in the same room with me for too long. My poor parents! As any trivia buff can tell you, the urge to talk about your discoveries is just as compulsive as the need to make them. Perhaps this post should be called "In Praise of the Loved Ones of Trivia Collectors?"

Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities

2004-07-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

by Kevin Jackson

I seem to be inadvertantly creating a small box set, because this book would be entirely appropriately incorporated into a handsome gift-package with John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason and Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History. All three attempt to intelligently and entertainingly communicate some of the more obscure aspects of literature and of the bookish life to the common reader. This particular book is dedicated to the exploration of the various forms of paratext: footnotes, titles, eprigraphs and various other near-essential, but often overlooked technical aspects of printed literature. This may sound like dry and dull stuff, and no doubt some enterprising person could make it into something dry and dull, but Kevin Jackson does just the opposite. In fact I was laughing so helplessly and so much, that my sweetheart asked me to "go read in the other room, I was making it impossible for him to concentrate!" My penchant for reading all of the funny bits out loud couldn't have helped, as there were at least two on every page. Poor Todd!

Jackson goes out of his way to explain that this is not a scholarly work, somewhat disingenuously, I might add, as it is clear from the sheer volume of citations in the book that he has definitely done his homework. What he has not done is sacrificed clarity or humor in the pursuit of precision. How this makes the work not scholarly is anyone's guess, but I am sure some of the mythical, dry-as-dust-writing-for-tenure-locked-in-their-ivory-tower scholars could explain it to me. For my part, the best scholarship is that which makes itself accessible to everyone, by which I don't mean that it dumbs itself down, but that it clears away some of the unnecessary obfuscation that seems to plague publications that are written only for other (competing) experts. Call me crazy, but I believe that any concept accessible to one human can be explained in such a way as to engage the interest and intelligence of another. This book is a stellar example of just that kind of explanation, putting it into such illustrious company as The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, The Copernican Revolution by Thomas S. Kuhn and The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. W. Tillyard. It's a noble pursuit, that of making knowledge accessible to the masses, and I suspect that it is also enjoyable. Invisible Forms definitely benefits from its author's sense of play and keen ear for a good joke. There is no doubt in my mind that the task of writing the book was fun for him and he makes reading it fun for us.

Find this book at Powell's

Spice World (1997)

2004-07-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

Bob Spiers, Director

Who doesn't love the Spice Girls? You know you do, don't even bother trying to deny it. I know that in your heart of hearts, you've always had a favorite, which means you know just enough about them to decide which one is the ultimate Spice. My personal vote is for Ginger. Yes, luscious redhead with attitude is definitely on my list! Seriously though, I never thought I would find myself saying this, and maybe it means that I am just behind the times, but the Spice Girls, who I scoffed at repeatedly during their heyday, are starting to look downright fantastic in comparison to the tacky choices in girl pop music available to us today. The attempt to fuse riot grrl energy with pop seemed laughable at the time, but now that it has failed miserably and been replaced in the teenage girl's affections by the likes of Brittany (sp?) Spears and Christina Aguilera, The Spice Girls stand out as an oasis of frivolous sanity in the desert of available girl role models.

The fact that they are a group, rather than one diva may be part of why that is. Sure their "personalities" were contrived and cartoonish, but they offered up a choice. Did you sympathize with Sporty Spice and Title IX? Were you a bit on the wild side and did you covet Scary Spice's tongue stud? Of course, I am not trying to say that the girls embodied every category of choice for women, but they did represent an idea of individuality, as if saying to anyone watching, "You don't have to live up to any one standard. You can strike out on your own, and we will still love you." Because the other thing that the Spice Girls were about was friendship between women. This was not Madonna and [insert teen diva here] kissing at the Grammy's, not catfights between famous girls, not cutie-pies whose entire emotional life seems to be centered around boys. These five were almost exclusively portrayed exploring and supporting their friendships (manufactured or not!) with one another. This may seem like a small thing, but in the fight for the attention of young girls this is hugely significant. It isn't exactly news that, once they reach the teen years, girls are practically encouraged to compete with one another. They are fighting over the three nice boys in any given high school class, and will later compete for the three nice jobs available for women in any given company. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would go so far as to say that this is specifically engineered to keep women powerless, because how else are you going to disenfranchise 51% of the population while at the same time enforcing their belief that they are in possession of equality? Wait, I know, why don't you get them to think that other members of their group are the enemy! We won't go there.

In any case, images of women from different backgrounds and different viewpoints working together to their own mutual benefit are definitely a step in the right direction. You may not immediately think of the Spice Girls when listing examples of this principle, but you should. They may not be the best example, but they did embody just such an image, and not only that, were able to reach massive numbers of people all over the world.

We all know how they did that, don't we? Their songs were and are insanely catchy, for one. Anyone who tells you that they cannot hum even one Spice Girls song is most definitely lying. They are all completely adorable, but not too-perfect-looking. They are British, hilarious, exuberant and wear colorfully odd clothing. They are unfailingly positive about almost everything. They are fun. That's it, that's all you need. I just watched Spice World again this weekend, and I was laughing basically non-stop except when I was dancing around the living room. These girls are definitely worth the price of a rental. Give it a try, it can't hurt!

In Praise of Any Particular Day

2004-07-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

Probably we all have times that stick out in our memory as being just right, when everything happened in just the way that would make us most contented. Maybe you can remember just one, or if you are lucky, you have hundreds to call up when you need them. There are several images that are popping into my head as I write this: my first date with my sweetheart, one New Year's Day I walked all around Seattle with a co-worker/friend, the strange hour I spent memorizing the shape of a cherry tree against the sunset sky (I was 7 years old). All of these things were sweet in one way or another, but there is one particular day the memory of which came at me with such intensity that it inspired me to write this very paragraph.

The house I grew up in is below the street. It is also on a dead end, so it is unusually quiet for a city neighborhood. In front of the house there is a rock-wall sloping down from street-level into a patch of grass, some Japanese maples and a small wooden deck. One summer day, when I was maybe 13 years old (or whatever age is old enough that I could stay at home while my parents were at work), I had the house completely to myself. I took a quilt that someone had made for me when I was very small, a pillow, a glass full of ice, a pitcher full of sun-tea and a very big book--whose title I have since forgotten, but which may have been Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy--out onto the deck. I laid myself down on the quilt and read that book all day. While I did as a child and I do even now spend many whole days reading, there was something different about this day that has tucked it away in my memory as one of the best days of my life. For one thing, there was never a moment when I felt even remotely uncomfortable. Anyone who is an avid reader will know what I mean when I say that you can keep reading through many discomforts, but that it is also frequently impossible to find a way to be physically happy and still see the book you are reading. Everything was perfect that day: the sun was shining, but it wasn't hot; there was a breeze, but it wasn't cold; the pillow and quilt were just soft enough that lying on the wooden deck wasn't a hardship. I felt like a cat lying there, or like some mythical creature freed from ordinary discomforts. To complete my happiness, the book I read that day was not only fast-paced, interesting and new, it was long enough that I could read it all day without having to find another one. I was able to relax in the knowledge that I could read as long as I wanted without having to go back inside and find something else which was bound to be not-quite-as-fine. And that is just what I did.

I was never able to recreate the perfection of that day, though I tried many times. It was just luck, a gift for which I am grateful. What interests me now is how much my "gift" will be perfectly meaningless to many of the people reading this. I am positive that all of us have a day or hour that we remember with the same fondness, but I am also positive that they are all very different. My "perfect day" won't sound like anything special to someone who doesn't like tea, sunlight and long books, but I am sure that this someone could describe to me a day that epitomizes those things that they do like. I would love to hear them all, but I don't suppose I can do that. I guess what I really want to do is encourage you to think about yours for just a moment. I loved remembering mine.

Library: An Unquiet History

2004-06-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

by Matthew Battles

Our relationship to the library is so complex, and libraries are such an ubiquitous part of human society that it would be nearly impossible to even summarize their history and impact in a single volume. Battles does an admirable job of skating lightly over the surface of this topic. The book feels a bit like a skipping stone: touching down here, resting very briefly there, but keeping its forward motion. It isn’t shallow, for all its brevity. The book includes some very fine anecdotes about the more (and less) famous libraries in history, ones I at least, had never heard before. Most unusually, the reader comes away with a real sense that Battles feels strongly and has thought deeply about libraries and what they mean to him and to the world. There is at least one slightly muddy chapter, where what he is trying to articulate is subtle and complex enough to finally elude him, but I for one, appreciate the failures that occur because the author is reaching for something that is truly difficult. Never once does this interfere with the entertainment value of the book.

There is more mystery and adventure in the history of the library than you could possibly imagine. Kings are deposed, cultures destroyed and rebuilt, scholars fight, pirates raid, and books themselves march ever towards eventual destruction. Battles is happily not overly Euro-centric, and touches briefly but fascinatingly on the amazing libraries of China, the Middle East and Mesoamerica. (I was chagrined to realize that, while in Florence, I was a block away from a library whose collection includes a rare codex of Nahuatl Hieroglyphs and we did not go and see it!) The book races by, and should be fun for almost everyone. For my part, I was moved by Battles' musings, almost to tears at one point. There is something essentially poignant and hopeful, as well as despair-inducing-ly impossible, about the attempt to collect and to share knowledge itself.

Find this book at Powell's

Secretary (2002)

2004-06-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

Steven Shainberg, Director

Will you think badly of me if I tell you that I adored this movie? What indeed does it say about me as a woman and a feminist if I tell you that I have watched this film a dozen times and seen something new to love in it every time? I honestly don't know. There are pieces of art (and trash) that hit you somewhere else than the part of you that can usefully critique them, and you are forced by blindness to give up on trying to analyze what that means about you or said piece. For me, this is one such film. Some of you may be wondering why I am bothering to review it if that's the case, and to this my answer is simple: I love it, and I want to share it.

Secretary was intended to show to a mainstream audience that the S/M love-lifestyle was not distasteful or shallow or cheap, and that S/M was not so different from anyone else's lovelife-style in its tone if not its details. The film is a complete failure from the standpoint of its ability to make a rational argument for any such thing, and even from the standpoint of its attempt at that argument, which was built upon a spectacularly flawed principle foundation. The characters of this movie don't make good examples of the comparative normality of those who express their love through the signs and games of S/M, because their particular inclinations towards S/M seem to have sprung from abuse, trauma and mental unrest. In other words, they embody the very stereotypes that the S/M community has been struggling to eradicate for years. The argument is spun sugar, it falls apart if you try to examine it. The characters find happiness through their relationship, but only because they were spectacularly messed up to begin with? It's the same stereotype, with a shiny, new face.

Happily, good rhetoric and good art are not the same thing, even if they do cross with one another from time to time. In the case of Secretary, the characters and setting and story prevail. Or, I should say, Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader work a magic spell upon you that disables your ability to care about the subtext. This film really belongs to Gyllenhaal. I can't imagine it without her. She manages to use her eyes and her body-language to turn the troubled character of Lee Holloway into a much stronger, slyer person than was (I suspect) called for by the script. Her transformation through the course of the film is nothing short of miraculous, but even in the opening scenes, she seems to be commenting upon everything that happens with a look that is superficially open, but essentially secretive, wise and silently judicious. The contrast between her small, girlish voice and the judgement that is clear in her face is completely bewitching. You immediately understand the fascination she holds for the (also incredibly closed-off) lawyer played by James Spader. You also understand that she is cunning, able to see what she needs in his domination games and to take it, even as his character flounders in confusion.

This little thing works to carry the entire movie. Gyllenhaal's eyes turn this film from what could have been a joke or an insult into a real love story. The viewer is able to relax in the confidence that she knows what she is doing and what is best for her, and to enjoy what is happening. (Well, either that, or find everything completely distasteful anyway, like the woman who was sitting behind us in New Orleans who refused to either shut up or leave the theater, thank you so much!) For those not easily disturbed, there is plenty to enjoy, including, but not limited to, fine acting by every single person on screen, a fantastic score, the oddest, most charming movie-set lawyer's office I've ever seen, some completely hysterical moments and some intensely sexy ones. I can't make the case that it is the right thing to love this movie, but it is charming and lovely to watch.

In Praise of Duchesse de Bourgogne

2004-06-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

Last year, we went to see E.T. when it was at the Cinerama. After crying like children and eating peanut butter candies for a couple of hours, we walked home. On our way, we passed a tiny pub that mysteriously chose to open in the space previously occupied by a typewriter repair shop. The pub is called The Stumbling Monk, and they have a rotating roster of amazing Belgian beers on tap. This particular evening, we were inspired to try one with the rather romantic name of Duchesse de Bourgogne. Granted, we were in a mildly sentimental mood, and granted that the pub is rather evocatively seedy and old-fashioned, but it wasn't all mood and atmosphere that led me to call this beer "a revelation." First, there is the color, a beautiful burgundy-brown, then there is the smell, which is like pine-woods, or spices, but wait, that can't be right because, finally, the taste reminds one of cherries, wine and something else warmer and more beer-y than any of those things, with again a hint of spice. O, the Duchesse is heaven in a glass! It is by far the best beer I have ever tasted, and I mean better than De Dolle's 'Still Nacht' and everything! Don't dismiss it as "mere enthusiasm." I am not alone in my adoration of this one-of-a-kind libation. The folks at Bottleworks in Wallingford greet each purchase with a sigh of, "Ah, the Duchesse!" Long may she rule!

The Last Samurai

2004-06-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

by Helen DeWitt

The Last Samurai (no connection to the Tom Cruise movie, by the way) was actually one of the first books of the week, but I didn't properly review it at the time. I've always regretted that, partially because, although I will usually claim that I have no favorite book, when I re-read this one for the 4th time last week, it occurred to me that I love it with a passion completely unrivalled by my love for any of the other books on my list. There is so much going on in the book, I can't imagine ever tiring of it. It is--among other things--a rosetta stone, a hilarious account of what it's like to raise a genius child, about being a market of one in a world that often favors mediocrity, and a paean to Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. The narration is begun by Sibylla, who is just about the snarkiest, funniest, and smartest mother character ever in fiction, and is then taken over by her son, who by the time he is writing journal entries to us at age 6, can read and write in English, Greek, Arabic, Latin, French, Japanese and Hebrew. Their voices are distinctly different, which is enough of an accomplishment all on its own, but what is best about them is that their rhythm is more akin to what it actually sounds like in your head than any other piece of writing I've ever read. There are random interjections and leaps of thought contained in the narrative that feel exactly like the random leaps of connection that actually happen when you try to think about a subject. They give the book a liveliness that carries it through the meandering of its plot, adding mystery and excitement where they would not otherwise be. Better yet, the leaps and gyrations of both the characters' minds are often hysterically funny, in a way that only something you could not have thought up yourself can be. It is an amazing accomplishment, and insanely fun to read.

Find this book at Powell's

Twin Peaks (1990-1991)(TV)

2004-06-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

David Lynch & Mark Frost, Creators

Okay, so it's not Friday and this isn't a movie. For some strange reason that doesn't bother me!

Over the last week or two, I have been watching this show, definitely not for the first time, as anyone who went to high school with me can attest. My friends and I loved Twin Peaks with an unparalleled fervor. We wandered around quoting Special Agent Dale Cooper ("They've got these trees! Douglas Firs!"), learning to tie cherry stems into knots with our tongues, drinking our coffee black and driving up to the Mar-T Cafe for a slice of cherry pie. Why the devotion, you may ask?

Twin Peaks was so much better than any other show on television, it seemed to come from a different planet! (Which isn't so far from wrong, where is David Lynch from anyway?) It was filmed more like a movie than a TV show: the colors are lush, the settings are detailed and real, and the actors are a step (or leap) up in caliber. Angelo Badalamenti wrote a fantastically strange score for it, the most effective piece of which accompanies the famous opening credit sequence, shot almost entirely in North Bend.

For those who are not familiar with the series, the pilot opens with someone finding the body of a girl who you quickly discover was a prom queen with many devious secrets. The rest of the show is ostensibly devoted to the discovery of said girl's killer, and is more generally about the evil that can lurk in small towns, hidden within all of the good. As suggested by the title, Twin Peaks is more about the town than it is about any one member of it, but this place is peopled almost entirely by oddities, all of whom are tangled up so tightly with one another that even the devoted viewer occasionally has a hard time keeping all of the connections straight. Lynch presents us with characters who seem like archetypes of smalltown life: the diner waitress, the football hero, the prom queen, the rich girl, the biker, the sheriff, then he peels back the facade to show us the completely idiosyncratic lives they lead. It is like having your cake and eating it too. He focuses lovingly on the details of each archetype--saddle shoes, cigarettes, letterman's jackets--while at the same time chiding us for believing that real people are like their stereotypes.

Hidden in all this tangle is some genuine horror, the mystery definitely works to freak and frighten you, but often the show is voluptuously sexy or goofily funny. People drawl a bit, they say outrageous things, the light is never good, but often sultry oranges and reds, everyone is having an affair, the girls all wear plaid skirts and saddle shoes, and Special Agent Dale Cooper is the geekiest, cutest FBI agent you are ever going to see on TV. (Yes, that's right, geekier than Mulder.)

For me, that was the last straw. Truthfully, I was a fan from the first moment: the music swells over the shot of a bird, then switches to a sawmill, where a blade is being sharpened to the EXACT rhythm of the music; just right then, just like that, I was in love. Little did I know that this feeling was as nothing compared to my delight with Kyle McLachlan's rendition of the goofily enigmatic Agent Cooper. I am not even going to start sighing over him here or I'll never stop, but I will say that he steals every scene he's in except the ones with the bewitchingly beautiful Audrey Horne, and their flirting is some of the best and most delicate on television. "My Special Agent" indeed!

I would (of course) recommend that everyone who was so unlucky as to miss it the first time run right out and get it on video. This isn't always easy. Only the first season is currently available on DVD, and as far as I know that doesn't include the pilot episode, which you absolutely cannot do without. You have to watch the pilot on VHS, the first season on DVD, the rest of the shows on VHS and 'Fire Walk With Me' (which should be watched in between episode 16 and episode 17) on DVD. Good luck finding all that, but it is well worth the trouble, believe me!

In Praise of Bubble Tea

2004-06-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

I am not sure I could have successfully quit smoking if someone in Taiwan hadn't invented Bubble (Boba) Tea. The first three months after I quit, I just wanted to kill everything, and the one thing that cheered me up when I had to end my day without my lovely, little, handrolled cigarettes and a cup of tea, was the fact that a Bubble Tea stand had just opened up on one of the streets I passed on my way home. I would stop, chat a bit with the owners, get a Jasmine Green Tea with tapioca pearls, and walk home happily gnashing the pearls into little bits. Nowadays, I rarely get the feeling that I will knock someone down just to steal their cigarette, but I still love bubble tea. It's sweet, comes in a crazy variety of luscious flavors, and the tapioca pearls are like food crossed with toys. For a while, my favorite bubble tea was the Thai Iced Tea with Bubbles at the Oasis Tea Zone, but that has recently been supplanted in my affections by the Lavendar Black Tea at Gossip. Yum! Trust me, there's a flavor out there for you...

Elfquest Graphic Novel #1: Fire and Flight

2004-06-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

by Wendy & Richard Pini

It is getting on towards summer, and I am feeling a little bit frivolous today, or maybe frisky is a better word for it. Whatever the case, I want to say a little bit about Elfquest. Those of you who have already sampled the delights of Wendy Pini's famous comic, and are having a laugh at my expense, don't leave just yet. For those of you who don't have a clue what I am talking about: Elfquest is a comic that was created (and independently published) by Wendy and Richard Pini in 1978. It has been growing like a blackberry bramble since then, trailing devoted fans behind it, and its many convoluted storylines are miraculously still published by the company that the Pinis created: Warp Graphics. I discovered Elfquest, with the help of my friends, when I turned 10, and was immediately hooked. I eventually outgrew my obssession, but this, the first book of the series, still inspires a certain sheepish fondness.

What is Elfquest about? Well, I'd have to say that it is about scantily clad, beautiful women with pointy ears who fall in love with scantily clad, beautiful men with many muscles and pointy ears. Sometimes they hunt for food, fight, or go on--of course--quests. The drawings manage to make the elves look friendly, cuddly, fierce and sexy all at once. All joking aside, there is usually some kind of an adventure to keep you reading, and a good mix of drama and humor. Really, though, what kept me enthralled as a teenager was that it was sexy in a PG-13 sort of way, romantic and full of barely dressed elflings. Sometimes that's all you need.

Note: You will see two links below. They are both for color editions of 'Fire & Flight.' The only one of these that's currently in print is the VERY expensive "Archive" edition. There is also a black and white reprint available, but it just isn't as fun.

Find this book at Powell's

Or try this one...

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

2004-06-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Krzysztof Kieslowski, Director

The Double Life of Veronique has always enchanted me, but when I sit down to write about it, all I have is fairy dust. I find myself wondering if “inscrutable” is quite the same thing as “meaningful.” This film has always seemed fraught with meaning to me, if only because I have never been able to understand it.

As suggested by the title, the piece visits the life of Veronika/Veronique, two doppelganger-girls living in separate countries on the same timeline. The premise is that they are each subconsciously aware of the other’s presence in the world. They share a passion for music and a hauntingly beautiful singing voice, and, as is supposedly the case with separated twins, events in Veronika’s life inform the future decisions of Veronique. Towards the end of the film, this fairy-tale premise turns further in on itself, snail-like, when Veronique is seduced by a puppeteer who writes and performs tales that resemble Veronika/Veronique’s life.

This tale is filmed in a wash of gold and red, such that the viewer receives the impression of looking into an old daguerreotype mysteriously brought to life. It is often so dark that even in my tenth viewing I struggle for a moment to understand what I am looking at. Is that a breast? Did she cut herself or is that a piece of string? It gives a dreamy, mysterious quality to the entirely ordinary city settings, and the clear or bright images acquire italics or exclamation points, as if to say, “Look at me!”

The spare visuals also enable Kieslowski to direct our attention to sound. There is a haunting piece of music that plays a major role in Veronika’s story which then echoes in and out of Veronique’s half. There is the puppeteer, who tapes ordinary city sounds and then sends them to Veronique as clues to his whereabouts—we hear squeaky doors, bells, cars and other noises dozens of times as she pieces out what they mean. But, unlike Veronique, we are not led anywhere by either chorus or creak.

I don’t mean to imply that the film is not beautiful or interesting. Irene Jacob is a treat all by herself, and many playful or sexy moments linger in the camera’s loving gaze. There is also a mystery to be solved at the end that is clever and original. Yet I feel a little bit as if I ate a piece of cake when I really wanted mashed potatoes. It’s lovely, but I am still not completely satisfied. I want to believe that it is deeply philosophical, and just went over my head; but I find myself less convinced by the premise that inscrutable = meaningful. Just because I can’t understand something, doesn’t mean that it is profound. And I don’t think this film is. Most spells aren’t.

--This review previously appeared in Matte Magazine #3

In Praise of Lush

2004-06-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

The signs for this company call their products "cosmetics." It would be more accurate to call them "spells to lure the unwary." Have you ever come across something that is just so good that your desire for it feels more like a compulsion than free will? If so, you may understand what is so unusual and almost eerie about Lush. They are most famous as purveyors of a stunning array of scented bath bombs (those things that sparkle and fizz as they dissolve in your bathwater, for everyone who has been on Antarctica for the last 5 years), but they also sell soaps, lotions, luscious melting massage bars, powders, hair products--basically everything you would ever need for pampering yourself, your skin and your sweetheart. (Well, my dad points out that they don't have candles, but you won't feel deprived, trust me.) There are, as you know, hundreds of companies that sell these very things, but Lush has cornered the market on what I can only call creative alchemy. They use natural ingredients, exotic perfume oils and highly unusual scent combinations to entice you in ways that most companies can only barely approximate by spending millions of dollars in advertising. If you are ever in a town with a Lush store (the closest one for us is Vancouver, BC), you will know what I am talking about: you can smell the store from a block away and it will call to you like the siren that it is, but even the descriptions on the website are startlingly alluring. I almost, almost wish I'd never heard of the place, as a nice chunk of my salary goes their way every month. Thankfully, their prices are almost laughably low considering the quality of their wares.

Addendum for those with sensitive skin: Lush uses natural ingredients wherever possible, and is the only company of its kind where I can safely buy and use 99% of the products without causing sadness to my VERY SENSITIVE skin. I've even thrown away all of the prescription stuff I used to take for my rosacea and replaced it with products from Lush. Take that, Galderma! (Coalface, AfterLife Moisturizer and Eau Roma toner, for the curious.)

The Time Traveler's Wife

2004-06-07T16:52:00.000-07:00

by Audrey Niffenegger

The title of this novel is not a metaphor for something else; the book is about a time traveler and the woman he loves, but this is not science-fiction or, really, fantasy. Rather, Niffenegger uses the time-traveling to heighten our sense of the connection between the two characters, Henry and Clare. Henry's gift, it transpires, isn't so much a magical power as a disease that he has little or no control over. The one thing he can be sure of is that he will usually jump to a time and place to which he has an emotional connection. It is this conceit that drives the love story between him and Clare. When they meet for the first time, at the beginning of the book, it transpires that Clare knows exactly who he is: he has visited her since she was 6 years old, and over the years, he has taught her languages, played chess and talked about many things in a meadow that abuts her house. Henry, on the other hand, doesn't know Clare. All of those visits took place in her past, but his future. Their history, however one sided, adds immediate depth to their romance, but it doesn't seem forced. Many of us, I think, when we fall in love, feel that there are too many things we share in common with the other person for our meeting to be entirely an accident. Although this feeling may be illusory, it is real in its intensity, and it is that intensity that this novel conveys. The time-traveling and little paradoxes add confusion and mystery to the story, but it somehow feels akin to the confusion and mystery of love. It never feels like a gimmick, but seems to naturally add to your sense that they have an affinity for one another, that they share a complex history and an understanding. Their entire life together unfolds as the book continues, and of course they lose that flush of first love, but their connection remains dynamic, not fixed or stale, and that fluidity is somehow best expressed in the mechanism of Henry's time traveling. In this way, I guess the title actually is a metaphor, although the book is smart enough to leave the interpretation up to you.

Find this book at Powell's

Shrek 2 (2004)

2004-06-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury & Conrad Vernon, Directors

Shrek 2 is the proud possessor of the funniest moment I have seen in a movie in at least the last 5 years. I won't ruin the surprise for you, but suffice it to say that I was disturbing the small children around me I was laughing so hard. I am so glad I didn't go with my first instinct, which was to avoid this movie like the plague. With a few notable exceptions, sequels are a dangerous and often disappointing business. Neverending Story 2 comes immediately to mind as a film that did nothing but taint its predecessor, and the latest round of Star Wars movies can go in that category as well. I loved the first Shrek, and I was reluctant to harm that experience with a flawed sequel. Well, I needn't have worried. This movie is, if anything, as good or better than the original.

This sequel doesn't stray far from the themes of the first movie, but it manages to feel fresh nonetheless. There is a bevy of new characters, and the relationship between Shrek and Fiona has taken on new complexity. The pop culture references are faster and funnier, and the animation is outrageously perfect. It's almost alarming how detailed the characters are, you can see every hair on Fiona's head, and they are each a different color. There are several truly brilliant sight-gags that will have you howling with laughter.

Really, that's the key. The film could fail in almost every other respect (though it definitely doesn't), and still be worth the price of admission on the hilarity alone. Anything that makes you laugh until you are giddy and gasping for breath gets a gold star in my book. There is nothing better than walking out of a theater feeling happy for no good reason. You shouldn't need any other reason to see this movie, and I won't give you one.

In Praise of Fried Artichoke Hearts

2004-06-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you are wondering, right out of the gate, where one obtains a fried artichoke heart. I am reluctant to tell you because it is already difficult to get a table there on the weekends! I can tell you that they are the most lusciously wonderful fried food experience in this city. You can stop dreaming about the Kingfish's fried chicken, Top Pot's donuts or Puffy Fried Beef Roll at Bamboo Garden. Just put those things clean out of your head and replace them with the Ale Battered Artichoke Hearts at the Deluxe (okay, okay, just don't go on Thursday nights a'ight?). If you are still asking yourself, "what is so great about that," there may be something wrong with you, but I am willing to help out. Firstly, the artichokes are not the pickled kind you can buy by the jar or can at the supermarket. They are real, unadulterated artichoke, the Deluxe isn't stingy with the portions, and they are perfectly crisp, every time. I don't know if it is the batter, the oil, the timing, or what, but they are never soggy or unhappily limp. Just in case that isn't enough decadence for you, they come with a boat of Ranch dressing for dipping, and there is some magical property to the combination that I just can't resist. In fact, I should say, before you run out and try them, that these things are incredibly addictive: once you've had them, you will find yourself craving them weekly, and I don't need to tell you that they aren't especially good for you! I find myself not caring about that part; they are just too scrumptious to give up...but consider yourself warned.

Note (added August 11th, 2004): Shortly after I wrote this review, the Deluxe stopped serving this dish. I cried for a week. No, but seriously, if enough people go in and ask for them and complain when they aren't there, management may decide it is worth their trouble to reinstate the fried artichoke...It's worth it, trust me.

The Daughter of Time

2004-06-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

by Josephine Tey

Daughter of Time applies the sleuthing style of Agatha Christie or Peter Wimsey to an old historical mystery: did Richard III actually kill his little nephews?

Tey's detective, Alan Grant, has a gift for interpreting people's characters from their faces. The book opens with him stuck in a hospital bed with a broken leg, poring over a thoughtful gift from one of his friends: a collection of portraits from history. When he mistakenly labels Richard III a "noble and honest man", he is inspired to find out if his school books (and Shakespeare) were correct in their interpretation of his character. Aided by an out-of-work research assistant, he and we pore through old letters, eye witness accounts and other disparate pieces of evidence. I was surprised by this book, and still am. All of the action takes place in a hospital room, yet the mystery feels just as exciting as any involving car chases and confrontations. Each piece of the puzzle clicks into place cleanly, but each one is a surprise and a delight when it comes. This is true even after you know what the conclusion will be.

For those who weren't paying attention in World History: Richard III was regent for his young nephews after his brother Edward IV died and before the Tudors claimed the throne of England for their own (26 months later, making his one of the shortest reigns in English history). When Henry VII (?) came to London to claim his throne, the little princes were found to have been killed.

Find this book at Powell's

Peter Pan (2003)

2004-06-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

P.J. Hogan, Director

"I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!" At least, I did after seeing this deliriously wonderful version of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. This is the Peter Pan for those who just don't think they will ever be excited about a kid's movie again. I turned it on reluctantly, and was shrieking with laughter and happiness in just under 30 seconds. There is so much going for this movie, it's hard to believe I hadn't heard of it before. It's beautifully shot, for a start, in a way that bears no resemblance to reality: it is lit in lush blues and reds and greens, and set in magical-mystery places that refer to real ones, but aren't limited by any such thing as faithful reproductions. Edwardian London is foggy, but topped with crisp, clean and orderly silhouettes of buildings. The sky is full of stars as bright as stage lights and fantastically fluffy clouds. Never-Never Land is (of course) a tropical paradise in a full Crayola-box of colors, and rather wonderfully stormy when Pan is out of town. Everything is whimsical, everything is strange, everything is drenched in color.

Since a pretty setting does not a movie make, I was delighted to find that this one has buckets more going on than your average movie, be it for adults or children. It glides gracefully, and faithfully, through the plot points of Barrie's book, updating where absolutely necessary (Princess TigerLily comes instantly to mind), but leaving almost everything intact. The movie even succeeds in conveying some of Barrie's more peculiar notions, the ones usually left untouched by other movie versions--there is a lovely digression on the very first page of the novel, which is visually reproduced and then constantly referred to throughout the film. This is really enough to entertain even those who were raised on just a little bit too much Mary Martin, but it is only the tip of the iceberg for this film.

This Peter Pan is sexy! For those who don't remember much about the book or play, it is essentially a bittersweet story about First Love. Thirteen-year-old Wendy is the hero here, and she is swept off her feet by the mysterious boy-with-Tinkerbell-sidekick, and brought to Never-Never Land to play Mother to his Father for the Lost Boys. Most versions gloss over this slightly startling concept by making it comical, and also safe, usually with the casting of a cute-but-motherly woman as the Peter Pan character. Not so here! This Peter is a mischievious elf of an almost-teenager, with a wicked grin and come-hither eyes; Wendy, all wide-eyed innocence, is nevertheless a match for him in wit and charm, and the two engage in a wonderfully guileless flirtation. They are innocent, and the movie doesn't touch that innocence, but Wendy, at least, is hovering on the edge of adulthood, and is playing games with her own sense of romance and attraction. This isn't an easy thing to convey, I am sure, but it is fascinating to watch. I found myself waiting breathlessly for the next time they would be on the screen together, even as I was enjoying everything else that happened in the meantime.

The fact that P. J. Hogan is able to successfully articulate this delicate piece of business with Wendy and Peter is really the key to the success of the film. Anyone who can stand back and create that kind of delight, and with such a light touch, is more than equal to the task of the less difficult aspects of the story. It is no wonder that everything about this movie shines.

In Praise of the Trash Can Sinatras

2004-05-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

I live in a music town, so I am familiar with the experience of meeting or listening to very talented people who will never be as famous as they deserve, but the Trash Can Sinatras are something different. They aren't just an amazingly talented band that didn't make it big, there is something about them that is or should be almost universally appealing. You'll laugh, but I have been doing experiments with this for years which go something like: step a) find someone who doesn't even like the style of music that the Trash Can Sinatras produce, step b) put on their album, Cake, and voila, instant fan! Not being a musical expert, I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what it is about them that makes me thrill with pleasure every time I listen. If I had to try to list the charms of the Trash Can Sinatras, I would START here: their lead singer's voice is balanced on that keen edge between pure and whiskey-and-cigarette-roughened, their song lyrics make very original use of the English language and are full of sneaky little jokes, and, finally, the music is almost insanely appealing. I don't know any other way to put it, it's just true. I am right this very second listening to a song called Safecracker from their out-of-print (!) album, Happy Pocket, and I swear to you, the guitar just makes me want to cry it's so good.

Anyway, this is turning into yet another one of those fun times where words just aren't adequate to convey what's great about something that I love. If I had you in my clutches, I would just force you to listen, or at the very least wave my arms about in enthusiasm, but I don't. *Sigh* I do know that you would be missing out on something amazing if you never once gave this band a try. In case I've done a horrible job of describing them, here's their website. Maybe they (and the other 500 of their incredibly excited fans) can do a bit better.

(Oh, and I want to send a never-ending cascade of gratitude to my friend Tizzy for, well, many things, but also for introducing me to this band.)

Tigana

2004-05-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay started his career as the editor of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, and that experience clearly influenced the kind of fiction he writes, but his writing voice is not that of Tolkien. What he does that resembles Tolkien's achievement is this: he takes artistic and cultural details from a real time and place, such as Renaissance Italy, for example, and creates a completely new world out of them. Tigana does indeed remind the reader of Italy, but in other, fundamental ways, it isn't at all the Italy of our world. In this version of Italy, which is almost too-cleverly shaped like a four-fingered hand instead of a boot, the separate provinces have fallen one-by-one into the control of one of two "evil" foreign mages. The peninsula is effectively split down the middle, one mage on each side, and we soon learn that's not even the biggest of our problems. The book quickly introduces us to a band of what I can only call rebel spies, who have taken it upon themselves to free their country and overturn some dastardly magic that has been perpetrated on the particular province where they were born: Tigana. Their machinations are by turns clever, elegant or breathtakingly exciting, and you immediately begin to sympathise with them and their plight, as well as thrill to their many adventures. Kay has a way of expressing the nobility and heroism of his characters that is very appealing, and he loves portraying geniuses, so everyone you run across is preternaturally gifted. This is tons of fun. The story races past and you really want the characters to win-win-win!

Which is why it may come as a surprise to you when I say that my favorite part of this book is the villain, or rather, the villain's love story. As I said, there are two conquering mages: one is a grasping, small-minded tyrant, the other mage is much more powerful and our heroes hate him much more because of the aforementioned dastardly thing he did to Tigana. Trust me, by the end of the book you will not agree with them! It is this paradox that makes the book more interesting and original than it would otherwise be on its own. You want both sides to prevail, even when you know that one side is more "right" than the other, and furthermore, that the success of one cannot even exist in the same world as the success of the other. Anyway, while you are working this dilemma out for yourself, you can enjoy a very piquant love story that draws all of its energy and suspense from that same dilemma. It's just delicious...

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Better Than Sex (2000)

2004-05-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Teplitzky, Director

It is so incredibly rare these days to see a good comic romance for grown-ups that I feel compelled to celebrate this stellar example. It is a small, quiet, Australian movie that has a very short cast-list, and is almost completely set in one woman's apartment, but is anything but slow and boring.

Better than Sex follows a man and a woman who meet at a party, decide to have a one-night stand and then find themselves grappling with the thing that many people who try to have "casual" sex forget all the time: that, if you enjoy one another's company, are attracted, enjoy what you are doing together, then it is almost impossible to keep your emotions out of it. (This isn't me being "girl-y", there is scientific evidence to support the idea that if two people are having great sex together, their bodies and minds start telling them that they are in love.)

In any case, this movie articulates the transition very delicately and believably, aided by two actors who are comfortable and funny and (happily for the viewer) beautiful to look at in a very accessible sort of way. This isn't Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow. Instead, think of the most lovely person you actually know, who is confident about herself and her body and has a wry sense of humor, and you will have an approximate picture of the stars of this film. (Susie Porter, I'd never seen before, but most of you will remember David Wenham from his turn as the sad-but-noble Faramir in Lord of the Rings.) Over the course of three days, they wander around a lovely, light-filled apartment, talking and teasing one another and lying around in various stages of undress (again, happily for the viewer). The two have almost perfect comic timing together, and are skilled enough at their jobs that they are able to convey what's happening almost entirely through their eyes. They can be joking about this or that, while the real drama is all happening under the surface. Not everyone is capable of conveying that in a subtle way, but these two (with the help of the director) are. You end up believing them and believing in their connection, in a way that is not possible with many romantic comedies these days.

As for what the movie is like to watch: it is a delight. It is all about golden light, golden skin, and breezy little jokes; it's sexy and entirely lovely. I watched it twice, just turned right around and started it over.

In Praise of Ranunculus (Ranunculae?)

2004-05-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

I was dinkering around looking for these on the web, and when I type in "Ranunculus," every single gardening store and florist comes up with the flower that I mean, but every single serious botany website shows me about a million different kinds of buttercup. I guess that means every botanist that this email goes to is going to think I am being horribly imprecise, ah well. The flower I am talking about is the one that has many tightly-packed petals, like a rose, but with petals that are indeed those of a buttercup in that they are very delicate and flat, and make the flower look more symmetrical and circular than roses ever do. Unlike any buttercup that I've ever seen, the ranunculus comes in a glorious array of colors: garnet reds, sunset oranges, pinks of all shades, and yes, even yellows. They are small, but beautiful flowers on goofy, looping stems. In the spring, I love to see them peeking out at the bottom of someone's garden, tucked under the more imposing flowers, but none of that is why I am singing the praises of the ranunculus today. I confess (for those of you who have gardens or flower-shops) that the first thing I do when I see a ranunculus is lean down, cup my hand gently over the top of the bloom, and pet it as if it were a small animal or child. You should definitely try this for yourself: those flowers are SOFT! It is unbelievable how soft they are, the petals brushing your palm ever-so-gently are like silk or baby hair or baby mouse hair or, or, or the softest, sweetest thing you can think of. Furthermore, the shape of the flower adds to the appeal of this activity: it fits into your hand as if it was made to go there. We are at the tail-end of the season for these delicate, little guys, but you may still be able to catch a few here and there. (They usually sell them at the Pike Place Market, actually.) For those who are shy: I have found that no flower seller is particularly offended by this behavior, strange as it might sound. Most people who have ever touched a ranunculus seem to understand...Give it a shot, you'll see.

Nick Hornby

2004-05-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years, Nick Hornby has received an alarming amount of attention, fueled partially by the fact that every single book he's written (with the exception of 'Songbook') has been made into a movie. Two of these movies feature stars who epitomize a certain breed of dreamily strange bachelor-boy that girls of my generation fell in love with many years ago. Both of those movies were very popular and well-received critically. That's all fine and good, and I adore the films, but my love for them is as nothing compared to my love for any little thing Nick Hornby chooses to write. I would hate for new-comers to his work to approach him as if he is a mere pop writer, the literary equivalent of, of, of...(actually, i don't know any pop bands, you'll just have to imagine one). Hornby is accessible to anyone who can read English, he has a nearly flawless sense of what will be funny, and he writes about contemporary life, often by comparing his characters' dilemmas to pop music or television, but he isn't just easy on the eyes. In fact, I have sat here staring at this page for quite some time, and I am nearly hysterical with the knowlege that I will not be able to properly convey to you what is amazing about him. It is entirely unique, entirely mysterious, completely real, wonderful, and again wonderful, but I can't tell you why. I just don't know how, and he is so popular, I would in any case have to wade through too many preconceptions to get to the heart. Just please read him, all of you! Just forget anything you have heard, and do it. You won't regret it; he is wry, funny and has his smoke-stained finger on the heart of what it is to be human in the 21st century.

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Proof (1991)

2004-05-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Jocelyn Moorhouse, Director

The first time I saw this film, I fell in love with the story of the blind photographer who is betrayed by the one person he trusts. This year, while watching it for the purpose of writing this snippet, the plotline that was the focus of my interest ten years ago seemed a mere frame for the truly original aspects of the movie. In brief, it goes like this: Martin (Hugo Weaving, The Matrix and LOTR) is a blind man who takes pictures of a world he cannot see. Andy (Russell Crowe, Master & Commander) is the straightforward young man he befriends and who describes Martin’s photographs for him. Celia (Geneviève Picot, Muriel's Wedding) is Martin’s housekeeper, who is in love with him, and shows it by playing cruel tricks such as rearranging his furniture. Just as it is made clear to us how important it is to Martin that he is able to trust Andy, that trust is broken by Celia’s machinations. Emotional upheaval ensues. All of this is portrayed with wit and spare stylishness, but it is not why Proof keeps me coming back.

Firstly, there is Martin’s blindness. This film is unique in that it is not interested in him as “handicapped.” He is not a focus for our pity. Instead, Jocelyn Moorhouse puts us into his experience by highlighting his sensitivity. Rustles of cloth or the tapping of rain linger on the soundtrack just long enough for us to become aware of what we are not accustomed to noticing. The camera closes in on tapping feet or ash dropping from a cigarette. These details give me the curious sensation that I am not sighted, that I-for the two hours of the film-need desperately to pay attention to what sound wine makes as it gets closer to the top of a glass or what someone’s footstep tells me about where they are in a room. I am stunned at the ignorance of Celia and Andy when they hope to hide from Martin, who is in the room with them, merely because he is blind.

Then there is the metaphor of the blind man who attempts to validate his experience by taking pictures, and who must rely on the honesty of another to “see” them. At first glance, this seems to be about trust. Aren’t we all blind when we try to look inside the head of another person? But the director has decorously left it open to interpretation. She does not give a neat little answer at the end of the film, or deal too heavy-handedly with the subject. As a result, the viewer is given the rare opportunity to consider what other things it might symbolize. Every time I watch this film, I see new meaning in this central image.

There are not many films that manage to be entertaining, and that also give their viewers a chance to consider larger questions from new angles. For this reason, I am deeply grateful that Proof was made and can still be found (if not easily).

--This review previously appeared in Matte Magazine #2

In Praise of the Cello

2004-05-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Before I begin, let me confess my almost complete ignorance of classical music, musicians or musical instruments. I wouldn't know a good cello or a good cellist if they bit me in the face, except that I can feel something in my bones when I hear a piece of music played on the cello. Some people respond to the piercing cry of the violin, and I do sometimes, but my first love has always been the cello. There is something warm and sexy about it, even in the higher registers, that makes me shiver. That warmth is echoed in the way that it is played: you have to curl around it, embrace it almost. There is something tender in the pose and placement of the instrument and its player. There is a boy who sometimes brings his cello out in front of Hana's on Broadway, and I marvel at him sitting there. It's not the best or safest corner of the world, and he looks so vulnerable and exposed, focused entirely inward on his instrument. Dogs bark, street kids fight and beg around him, but everything he plays sounds like a love song, and when I stop to listen to him, the other sounds begin to fade for me. You couldn't cast that spell with a guitar. It's something about that cello...Mmmmmm.

Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners

2004-05-10T11:40:00.000-07:00

by Ellen Kushner

At some point in my reading career, I was going against the advice not to judge a book by its cover, and reading everything with a cover illustration by Tom Canty. You may know who I am talking about if you read any fantasy whatsoever; Canty is a very famous and successful and much-awarded artist within that community. His paintings borrow heavily from the Romantics, but are recognizeably original. In any case, thank goodness I was following him around, because I may not otherwise have stumbled across this little gem of a novel.

Swordspoint is a diamond-bladed fairy tale, with not a soft edge in sight. It is peopled by characters who are by turns ruthless, brittle, witty and deliciously wicked, but never sweet. They each make their way in the winter-world of the book by the sword, by deceit, by cruel political intrigues. Perhaps this doesn't sound like a fairy-tale at all, but somehow, in the midst of the cynicism, Kushner manages to convey something magical and even romantic. She creates an atmosphere that for all its cruelty is very beautiful, and you will find after all that the ice hides a single pair whose hearts are true.

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Chungking Express (1994)

2004-05-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

Kar Wai Wong, Director

“Charmingly demented” is my favorite way to describe Kar Wai Wong’s film, Chungking Express. The film is separated into two distinct parts. In the first bit, cop #223’s bewilderment at the loss of his girlfriend is juxtaposed against the tale of a mysterious woman’s attempt to smuggle drugs out of the country. In part 2, Cop #663, left behind by a beautiful air hostess, is blind to the changes being made to his apartment by Faye, who sneaks in on her breaks from the Midnight Express to add goldfish to his fish tank, swap his blue sandals for pink ones and replace his canned foods with new brands hidden under the old labels.

Quirky details make each of these vignettes come alive, but my favorite is the dreamy one for Faye. While #663 chides his apartment for being sad that his girlfriend left, Faye cheerfully invades it. The second half of the film lingers on her. She doesn’t just redecorate, she spends afternoons lying on his bed eating lychees or frolicking brazenly around the apartment to the strains of “California Dreaming” or a Cranberries cover song. Her motivation is not entirely mysterious, if one is willing to allow for slightly demented crushes, but that’s not really a consideration for me as a viewer. Her wide-eyed glee at the mischief she’s making is worth the price of the rental.

It’s not the only thing. The principal actors are all convincing and sympathetic (as well as attractive). Each of them gets at least one perfectly demented and poignant moment of their own. The mysterious blond woman in the first story earnestly tells us that she has become very cautious because she wears both a raincoat and sunglasses. Cop #223 compares his relationship to expired cans of pineapple. I never know whether to laugh or cry.

All of this takes place in an urban setting that is Hong Kong but seems like a magical mystery place. There are few open spaces, long corridors, crowded walkways and stairs everywhere, buildings packed together so that you cannot see the sky, but the light is soft and pastel, there is dreamy music playing-a different song for each character-and the pace of the editing fluctuates from frenetic to syrupy-slow. You feel watching the film that you have entered a world that seems ordinary, but has more potential for magical surprises than the one that you are used to.

A world that is “charmingly demented.”

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed

2004-05-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Karen Elizabeth Gordon's accomplishment is simple yet significant. With this slim, wittily illustrated volume she has made the study of grammar into something mysterious and titillating. Her example sentences tell the fragmented story of a bunch of misfits--vampires, doomed maidens and seductive goblins--in a way that manages to be sly, sexy and educational at the same time. The book is a bracing tonic for those who remember excruciating hours spent learning how to diagram sentences, and many more hours bemoaning the uselessness of sentence diagrams. It imparts the essential rules of English usage, but it doesn't call to mind the classroom and blackboard as much as the swoonier moments of adolescence: the ones spent daydreaming about beautiful boys and shivering deliciously at the thought of future excesses.

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Little, Big

2004-04-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

by John Crowley

Some novels describe a world that is so deliciously strange, it almost doesn't matter what they are about. Little, Big is one such novel. After reading the book twice, the major impression I come away with is of a magical house, full of secrets and charms, and peopled by oddities. The book actually does contain a story, and it is an interesting one that leaves you full of ideas and questions, but it fades into irrelevance next to the physical details that Crowley almost teasingly releases to the reader. The desire to explore the place where the characters live is almost unbearable. They turn corners and walk out of rooms, intent on living out the story you are ostensibly trying to read, when what you would love to do is step inside and take a closer look. "Wait, don't leave that behind just yet," you want to shout, but of course it is impossible. You can only enjoy the glimpse he gives you, and it is a beautiful one.

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The Far Pavilions

2004-04-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

by M. M. Kaye

This book is a guilty pleasure of mine, left over from a childhood spent living out adventures on the page. I don't know if anyone here remembers M. M. Kaye, but she is also famous for a series of mystery-cum-romance novels with titles like: Death in Zanzibar, Death in Kashmir, Death in Berlin. This particular book is considered her crowning achievement; it is the longest and most complex of her novels, and is about her childhood home: India. Kaye seems to have a good grasp of the problems and culture of India under British rule, and she knows her history, but I would hesitate to call The Far Pavilions a "serious" book. It is a romance, in the best, old-fashioned sense, where unlikely things happen to everyone, people behave in a heightened and often heroic fashion, and the reader is flown from one amazing place to another. There are evil courtiers, beleaguered princesses, foundling children, battles, intrigues, murders and love stories. In fact, part of the book's weight comes from its homage to traditional melodrama and adventure: it gives a nod to Kipling, Collins, Bronte, Dumas and Stevenson, while at the same time retaining its originality. The Far Pavilions may be deeply flawed, but even at its worst, it is deeply fun.

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Stranger in a Strange Land

2004-04-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

by Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a Strange Land was a groundbreaking book when written, but I have never been entirely sure how to feel about it. For one thing, even though Heinlein holds a number of views that are completely repugnant to me, I found it impossible to stop reading it, and raced excitedly to see what happened at the end. This is Heinlein balanced precariously between his playful-children's-storyteller phase and his sexually-rapacious-dirty-old-man phase. It is completely original and exciting, but makes you want to cringe at the same time. There are also a number of solidly good, open-minded ideas about society contained herein, but in typical Heinlein fashion, they have been distorted to fit his essentially conservative weltanschaung. Perhaps all of this seems like a very good reason to avoid Stranger in a Strange Land, but I do think everyone should at least try it. Heinlein has a very appealing style, colloquial and often funny. His characters are likewise appealing, and strange in a way that strikes one as quintessentially "American" (whatever that means to you). He is also wickedly smart, and manages an outsider's view of our culture that can often give the reader a jolt of startled recognition, as long as they take Heinlein's interpretations of that culture with a grain of salt! Over time, I have developed two good ways of approaching a Heinlein concoction: either a. unreflectingly, enjoying and not questioning or b. hypercritically, teasing apart every statement (and looking up anything that is presented as "fact") to make sure that it means what you think it means. The first way is much more fun, but leaves the reader wide open to Heinlein's charmingly phrased insanity. He is incredibly persuasive, and freakishly wrongheaded at times. You are welcome to choose either route, but consider yourself warned.

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Any Human Heart

2004-04-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

by William Boyd

This book is a novel, but never once feels like one. It is presented as the private journals of one Logan Mounstuart, a man born at the beginning of the 20th century and sharing his life with us as he is batted about by the massive changes that take place during the 85 years following his birth. His voice is absolutely real, his character flawed in very ordinary ways, and his experiences are the slightly heightened ones of a very smart, but essentially marginal, player in world events. There were many times throughout the book that I completely forgot that Mr. Mountstuart was a fictional character. Which is not at all to say that his life sounds mundane, merely that its tone and eventfulness are on a human scale. Boyd never makes the chronic mistake of historical fiction; you know the one I mean: our hero misses by moments his chance to murder Hitler, avert Hiroshima or invent the television. Logan Mounstuart is a spy, he is an art dealer, he is a writer, but he is not superhuman, or unnaturally at the center of every major event of the twentieth century. This relative ordinariness had the wonderful effect of making this reader acutely aware of the precious and entirely exciting singularity of every life. The book reads like the fingerprint of a real life, and leaves you feeling that yours just might be, like Logan's, a very fine yarn in itself.

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Playing off the Rail

2004-03-29T12:48:00.000-08:00

by David Mccumber

I am a completely indifferent pool player, and would much rather watch a good game of nine ball than join one. Perhaps that is precisely why I like this book.

There are certain games that seem to have retained some of their seedy, shabby charm even in this age of televised gloss. Billiards is definitely one of those games, and this book is definitely a peek into the underside of the pool players' world. David McCumber basically bank-rolled a pool shark so that he could follow him around the country, watch him play and get a first hand view of his world. I don't need to tell you that he came away with many interesting stories, and his knowledge of the game is such that he is capable of conveying some of its excitement.

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Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse

2004-03-22T11:46:00.000-08:00

by John Hollander

I studied literature in school, but to be perfectly honest, I never really grasped the various poetical forms until I read this clever little volume. Hollander takes the reader carefully through the various forms and patterns of English verse, and accentuates each point with a small lecture-in-verse that uses the form that is described therein. In other words, his description of the villanelle IS itself a villanelle. Each little poem is funny in itself, but it is remarkable how the technique erases any confusion you might have had about the finer distinctions between one form and another. Just in case you don't have any confusion (or don't care about it one way or another), the book is enjoyable on its own. Watching Hollander fit his lessons into each verse format is like watching a circus performance. It's fun to see someone pull rabbits out of hats, right?

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The Herbfarm Cookbook

2004-03-18T15:48:00.000-08:00

by Jerry Traunfeld

I have not personally read this cookbook in its entirety, but I have eaten many wonderful meals (cooked by my talented sweetheart) that were taken straight from its pages. From the compelling evidence of delighted taste buds, I have concluded that this is an excellent reference. According to the aforementioned Mr. Poremba, the recipes are easy to understand. Traunfeld makes great food accessible to anyone with even a modest kitchen, and he includes lots of useful information about herbs for those who would like to experiment on their own. The Herbfarm Cookbook is a culinary work of scholarship that no home should be without.

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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

2004-03-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

by Jerry Mander

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that television isn't an entertainment, that the preoccupation with television is a disease, not of the viewers, but of our culture. Television seems to separate us from our best selves. It makes possible the suicidal cycle of consumption that is destroying our environment and keeping most people virtual slaves to their daily wage. The hundreds of channels available to the average cable customer give the illusion of choice, but all of those choices are controlled by a powerful few companies who have their own reasons for keeping people watching, buying and watching some more. Even educational programming is an illusion, for it is literally NOT possible to "learn" anything while your brain is in the state that watching television imposes upon it.

Now, over the last few years, I have participated in a number of conversations regarding these opinions of mine, and if you are anything like the majority of the people I have talked to you are probably thinking the following: a. that I am being an unrealistic, conspiracy-theorising alarmist, and b. if that's not true, then my concerns don't actually apply to YOU, the thinking person. YOU are not fooled by TV, you just use it to relax and educate yourself. Tell the truth, that IS what you are thinking! Well, if that's the case, I suggest that you check out this book. Once you have heard the arguments articulated therein, if you still believe a and b, please come see me. It may have been 30 years since Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television was published, but the social and economic effects it describes have changed only in that they have become more pronounced and extreme.

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Sister Wendy's 1000 Masterpieces

2004-02-25T14:42:00.000-08:00

by Wendy Beckett

I don't know how many of you remember Sister Wendy's art history show on PBS, but it hardly matters. This book would be a marvel even to those who have no idea what I am talking about! It is a big, beautiful, coffee-table book of Sister Wendy's picks from several centuries of "Western" art. The paintings are arranged in alphabetical order by painter, which adds to the experience of paging through the book by introducing randomness of style and era to the order. The prints are large and very clear, the colors outstanding, and the choices often surprising. Each painting is accompanied by a small, unobtrusive explanation by Sister Wendy. She is the best kind of art historian, in that she doesn't crowd your mind with her own opinion, just gives you some things to think about, and stands back to let you appreciate each piece on your own. I have only had this book for a week and have already wiled away many happy hours staring at it!

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Meditations

2004-02-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

by Marcus Aurelius

A friend of mine introduced me to this little volume a few years ago. He explained it something like this, and I can do no better: he told me that whenever he felt a little blue, or confused, or bewildered by his day, all he had to do was open the Meditations to any page. After he read a few lines, all would be well.

Try it for yourself. I think you will be surprised at the result.

Dune

2004-02-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

by Frank Herbert

Ah, Dune, the wonderous discovery of my freshman year in high school. May I just lay my own geekiness out for all to see?: at fourteen, I belonged to a club called the "Science-Fiction and Gaming Association" (SAGA, for short, of course!) that met at lunch in my English teacher's empty room. The 'Association' was begun by a group of older boys, and its main pursuits were the collection of science-fiction paperbacks, the watching of science fiction movies and Pink Floyd's 'The Wall', and the playing of such highly sophisticated games as 'Dungeons & Dragons' and 'Shadowrun.' The boys were a bit shocked and not at all happy when our group of tiny, teenaged girl geeks showed up to join in on the first day. I'll assume that they survived the experience, given that we're mostly all still friends...in any case, one of the ways in which they helped me was by suggesting this book.

It's hard to explain what's amazing about Dune, especially in light of the fact that many people's first exposure to it is the campy David Lynch movie version. What stands out the most is the intricacy of the future history that is displayed in the book. While you aren't overwhelmed with details, your reading of the book is always accompanied by the sense that Herbert has thousands of years of galactic politics, religion, science and social change mapped out in his head. Every event, every concept, every political intrigue of this very fast-paced and complex story is given a kind of credibility by the feeling that Herbert has worked out in detail every step leading up to and away from the events you actually hear about. I will even go so far as to say that the world displayed seems as if it could conceivably spring from our own; the ideas within are alien enough to be original, but familiar enough to seem possible.

Anyway, that's what makes Dune different. What makes it fun is a passionate, fast-paced story of deposed dukes, desert life, prophecy and revolution. For all its detail, you can whip through the book very quickly, unwilling to put it down until you find out what happens next.

All I have to say about it now is: thank you, Saga-boys...what would life be like without you?

Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy

2004-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

by Louisa May Alcott

For all that my parents had the raising of me, there are parts of my essential self that either came from or can be found in certain characters from books: Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Jane Eyre, and stubborn, bookish Jo March from Little Women come immediately to mind.

Believe me, I am not the only one who can find a kindred spirit in one of the March sisters. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if you can't find yourself in Little Women or (if you're not a girl) Little Men, then you just aren't trying hard enough. Furthermore, if you missed this as a child, it's not too late to try it now. You don't have to be little to be charmed by this story and the down-to-earth, forgiving world-view of the family inside.