Cellar dweller — Don't stop believin' — backwords — requisite BEA pic — back in the swing of things

I. Light posting here for a while...On Thursday (6/5) I'll be at the Book Cellar in Chicago, reading from Personal Days! More info here and here and at Time Out Chicago. (Looks like you can drink wine there?!)

II.
Who knew one could write so nicely about...Journey? Ben Ratliff pulls out all the stops:

From the late 1970s to the mid-’80s, Journey’s hits were lavish pop bulletins conjuring amber waves of strip malls. Its melodies resolved quickly over four-four grooves, and the band didn’t indulge much in suite form or rarefied instrumental interludes. Neal Schon was its front-and-center guitar player, bending notes into parabolas as big and sexy as rainbows. Steve Perry was its great theatrical tenor, hitting high notes with a likably strained, through-the-noise voice and Sam Cooke-type embellishments. Once it refined its formula, Journey was pure suburban-teen romantic inspiration. By contrast, Boston sounded more street and more mystical; Styx and Kansas were Trig 1 and 2. —NYT

III. On the Personal Days Amazon page, one can learn—well, I can learn—that 85% of the visitors to the page (as of today) buy Personal Days, while 7% buy a book called Daemon, by the curiously named "Leinad Zeraus." Here's more about that book, verblessly, from Publisher's Marketplace:

Leinad Zeraus's (aka database consultant Daniel Suarez) originally self-published debut technothriller DAEMON, "the story of a terminally ill game designer who unleashes a diabolical, self-replicating Web entity that enlists disaffected Netizens in its mission to destroy civilization," to Ben Sevier at Dutton, in a pre-empt, for publication in fall 2009, followed by a sequel, by Bridget Wagner at The Sagalyn Agency (world).

IV. I wasn't at BEA—but Blvr mg-ed. Andrew was!



V. Haven't written a movie review in a while. How does one do it...? Let's see....OK:

There Will Be Blood = good!

The first picture show

Over at Termite Art, Dizzies Team Member Rob points to a Buffalo News article about the Ellicott Building. "If one was looking for a cosmopolitan night on the town, you could enter the Edisonia Phonograph Parlor, head downstairs, and walk into Vitagraph Hall—one of the earliest, and possibly THE earliest, movie theater in the U.S., having opened in October, 1896," Rob writes.

(Here's the original article.)

From the Parkives, installment XIV

'Saint Ralph'
by Ed Park

Catholic schoolboy Ralph Walker (Adam Butcher) quixotically enters the 1954 Boston Marathon, magically thinking that a big Beantown victory constitutes a miracle—and only a "miracle," according to a doctor, will awaken his comatose mother. The odd mix of arbitrary plot and fastidious details (here is mid-century Hamilton, Ontario!) might lead a viewer to believe that Saint Ralph is the biopic of some awe-inspiring Canuck runner heretofore unknown stateside—Terry Fox pretty much filled up that informational pigeonhole. Discovering that it's all made up renders the experience even more pointless. The race itself is a suspenseful sequence of slo-mo uplift—suspenseful in the binary sports flick sense of either he wins or he loses, uplifting insofar as it's a music video scored to yet another version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," that de rigueur dirge that gives every montage from Shrek to the O.C .'s first-season finale a numinous coating of epiphany. There are points of contact with two other recent Catholic-youth titles: Millions (with its similar saint fixation) and House of D (fatherless boy, ailing mom). The most blatant rip-off is of the Rushmore soundtrack. But Ralph Walker is no Max Fischer, and his monomania gets dull fast. The unintentionally humorous high point comes when Ralph pores over an amazingly thin book entitled Canadian Martyrs, recalling the Airplane! passenger who, craving some light reading, receives the leaflet Famous Jewish Sports Legends.

—August 2nd, 2005, PTSNBN

Film issue

Am I the only one who didn't care for Children of Men? The long take at the end was pretty impressive, or was it simply impressive because I kept thinking, "It must be hard to do a long take like that, how do you choreograph everything?" etc.

Anyway, via Very Short List, here is Daily Film Dose's look at the long take. My favorite: "Russian Ark—The Whole Damn Movie."

And via The Morning News: Kristan Horton shoots scenes from Dr. Strangelove using household items.

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Ron Rosenbaum's written about the surreal in-flight catalogue Sky Mall, and suddenly the world of airborne literature seems ripe for analysis. The editor's note in the new American Way magazine gives you the sense that Sherri Gulczynski Burns figures, Nobody is going to read this, and if so—so what?

Do you have things on your to-do list that, no matter how important they are, take a backseat to everything else? Or is it just me? As I’ve mentioned before, writing this column is something I put off until the very last minute every single issue. I don’t know why. I think that only extensive (or intensive?) therapy would help me figure that out. This time, I even channeled the ghosts of all the users that IT people (read Wes) have “deleted” over the years, and I persuaded their spirits to infect my computer so that this file (and only this file) would not open. Sadly, the said IT person was able to fix it. So here I am.

As it makes me feel better to have an excuse, this time I’m chalking my procrastination up to it being the end of winter.

Hockey and basketball seasons have just come to a close, so it’s time to turn our attention to America’s favorite pastime. (And believe it or not, that favorite pastime is not happy hour!)

(It goes on...!)