Bookpusher

Just got word that NBC will burn off the remaining episodes of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” in May. Rejoice!

Programming note: I’m taking a quick blog break after my last class of the semester this weekend. I fully intend to catch up on my reading list.

Author David Halberstam died this evening in a car accident.

I note this because Halberstam’s book “The Summer of ‘49″, about the individuals, circumstances, and the heartbreak of the 1949 seasons of the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, remains one of the best books written about the sport I have ever had the pleasure of reading. It’s one of those books I get down off the shelf and read every so often. (His other books are good, too.) And “The Summer of ‘49″ also inspired my fierce and lifelong admiration for Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.

Just a reminder: Heroes returns on Monday night. You’re probably not nearly as stoked at this event as I am.

Sunday afternoon I popped in the first season of Alias on DVD – I was a slavering fanboy of the series but haven’t watched the original episodes in quite a while. I’m glad I did, because the five season arc of the show serves as an excellent example to any television program that uses the same type of episodic formula – like Heroes, Lost, and the like.

What made Alias so appealing was the characters and the relationships between them. At its base, it was a chick show on the level of Grey’s Anatomy. Granted, you had the secret agent stuff, sure, with all the occult conspiracy Rambaldi business, but it was just the excuse for everyone to be on screen. What really made me tune in week after week was brilliant casting, excellent performances, and relationships as complicated as any soap opera.

Problem was, after a few seasons, the writers started getting lazy and the show started to become about the secret agent occult stuff, which was pretty thin to begin with. Characters got lost, relationship histories were forgotten, and the less we say about the abysmal fifth and final season, the better. And if you look closely and squint, this is exactly what happened to Lost. Whatever the mystery behind the island is going to be secondary to the characters we watch – if you remember the first season, very little of the hows and whys of the island were revealed. Frankly, we didn’t care. We were too caught up in Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Sayid. We were too caught up in the characters, as we should have been. But now the show is all about the island’s mysteries, which will no doubt once they are revealed turn out to be pretty thin and lame and in a few years we all will be wondering what was such a big deal about the show in the first place.

My point to all of this? I hope to god that the crew behind Heroes is taking notes. Don’t make it about the powers. Make it about the characters, and we’ll be tuning in for years.

In the interest of complete fairness, I should probably tell you that I’ve already read this book. Also, I should probably tell you that even before I read the book the first time, I was (and am) a huge, unabashed, slavering Neil Gaiman fan due to his award-winning Sandman series of comic books and graphic novels. And I should also tell you that the movie version of Stardust is coming out soon and you’ll no doubt be hearing much more about it.

I picked it off the shelf the other day. I hadn’t read it in years, and plus I had trouble remembering exactly why I liked the book. With some books it’s good to reacquaint yourself with every so often, like that friend in your life who you feel close to but only see once or twice a year.

Anyway: the book. It’s my favorite of Gaiman’s novels. All of his books have the dead-on feel of the modern fairy tale, but he’s sometimes prone to being a little too flippant with his characters, just a tad bit shallow, and with too much of a wink to the audience, if you catch my meaning. With Stardust, he gets that balance of fantasy and seriousness just right.

Back in the early Victorian era there exists a town called Wall in the British countryside. It’s named that because of the thick stone wall that separates the sleepy farming town from the world of Fairie – every nine years, the veil lifts and a fair brings the two communities together for one night. One of the town’s youth, Trystan, is a dreamer who falls for the town beauty and promises to do anything she asks. To put him off, she suggests he go retrieve a star that they watch fall from the night sky. So, being the romantic sort, Trystan sets out to go get it. What follows involves an adventure that includes talking trees, witch-queens, pirates who fly airships, shape-changing animals, and True Love. It’s a Brit version of The Princess Bride without the postmodern wisecracks, a modern-day Midsummer Night’s Dream written after a few glasses of wine and a night on the town. This being a fairy tale, Gaiman insures that every plot point is wrapped up and every character, even the minor ones, have their important roles to play in the story. The book is written in a light, dreamlike tone that lulls you in like a mother humming a half-remembered lullaby to her child.

Of course, there’s a better-than-excellent chance that Hollywood will completely screw it all up, but I have faith. There’s a beautiful story here and Gaiman’s has yet to sell out. But: everyone knows the book is always better than the film.

If you’re a blogger in the Kansas City area, please consider going to the blogger meet-up at Harry’s Country Club in the City Market area. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it due to other obligations, but the community needs it. Go, get toasted, take pictures for the rest of us.

Special thanks to Well Hell Michelle for getting the ball rolling.

I was busy all day yesterday, so I completely missed news of the Virginia Tech shootings until after work that evening. I turned off NPR after I got the basic facts. Like most people, I immediately thought of the World Trade Center and Columbine tragedies.

I made the decision not to give in to the seductive lure of disaster porn, of endless television shows with streams of pundits telling us about how their pet hobbyhorses caused the disaster. I’m not watching interviews of some student’s best friend’s high school shop teacher about what a nice boy they once were. Because none of it gets to the heart of why.

This was an irrational act. For a rational person like me, that means that I can never, ever, really know why. All the interviews in the world cannot allow me to see into the mind of the student who did this. Point the finger at whatever cause you like: gun control, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, illegal aliens, the cancellation of Studio 60, whatever. It’s all just guesswork. The only person who can answer that question is gone.

So I won’t watch. I’ll follow the headlines and the basic details, but that’s it. I won’t give in to the hours of soul-sucking disaster porn. My heart goes out to the families and the community, but I’m staying away.

Had a nice three-day weekend, which was needed after last week’s school extravaganza. The wife and I caught some DVs, including Inside Man, which was an okay movie, and Memoirs of a Geisha, which was a surprisingly good one, even though it didn’t quite have the guts to avoid the cliche Hollywood ending.

We went and saw The Lookout at the theaters, which was time well spent. Loved. This Film. It was written and directed by Scott Frank, the screenwriter behind excellent films like Minority Report, Get Shorty, and Out of Sight. Frank specializes in caper flicks, and if nothing else I was hoping for an above-average crime drama with maybe some funny lines thrown in for my amusement.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fresh off last year’s amazing performance in Brick, plays Chris, a kid who had it all until he suffered a brain injury in a car accident and now works as a night janitor at a bank. He attends therapy classes, as he has problems with short-term memory, especially when it comes to putting events in the past in proper sequence. He struggles with accepting his lot in life until he meets an ex-classmate who wraps him up in a world of positive self-esteem and partying.

We easily slip into Chris’ world, and we feel his frustration when he can’t do things that regular people take for granted. He can’t have a regular conversation when he meets a pretty girl in a bar because he might blurt out something inappropriate; he wants desperately to leave his job as a janitor and work at the teller’s desk so he doesn’t have to feel ashamed of himself at family dinners. So when his old pal Gary comes into his life, he sees him as a portal to something normal. What Gary has in mind, of course, is far from normal.

Amazing film. It’s one of those low-key thrillers driven by a tight narrative and deeply absorbing plot, and at the end everything unfolds into a satisfying conclusion that never rings false or cheats the audience. Excellent performances throughout: Jeff Daniels turns in a sublime performance as Chris’s blind roommate who has suspicions about his new friend; and hottie-of-the-moment Isla Fisher stands out as an ex-classmate of Chris who shows him a good time or two. Especially surprising is Matthew Goode as Chris’ new friend Gary – keep an eye on this actor. He very nearly upstages everyone else.

Also of note: most of the film takes place in Kansas City even though it was filmed in Canada. Amazingly, the movie gets the Kansas/Missouri divide right, even though every other film always screws it up. For that alone, it deserves kudos.

Going to Rainy Day Books in Fairway always puts me in a good mood. If you’ve never been there or live outside of the Kansas City area, you’re missing out; Rainy Day Books is one of the best independent bookstores in the nation. They are the Platonic Ideal of Reader’s Advisory: each member of the staff is a world-class reader who can recommend excellent books in pretty much every genre. Victorian lesbian vampire mystery-noir? Check. Non-fiction regarding the inner lives of former Undersecretaries of Agriculture? Check. Australian surrealistic gothic historical romances? With dragons? Check.

Rainy Day used to be a chain of used bookstores back in the day – my mom and I used to go to the branch in Raytown where I grew up (yes, I was born in Raytown, shut up) as a wee lad would devour fantasy novels and Steven King books by the armload. I bought my first tattered Raymond Chandler novels there, too. A rich part of the Kansas City landscape that makes this town a kick-ass place to live.

Oh, and I must mention my emerging love of the pop-culture website DeadOn, especially the Tied to the 90s series, which was a delight to just rummage through the archives. Go forth!

For some reason, I’m incredibly disturbed that the rotating globe on the front of the earthday.net website is actually just a globe-shaped Mercator projection.

Which, of course, is completely inaccurate. And disturbing.

Last weekend’s class really took it out of me and I think I’m still in the process of mentally recovering from it. On Saturday I had to wake up early, drive the hour and a half to Emporia, be in class all day, drive the hour and a half back, pick up my wife, and then immediately go the half hour over to the Missouri side of the state line to my mom’s surprise birthday party with the extended fam. I’m sure I looked like a complete zombie, throwing down cup after cup of coffee during dinner in my completely futile attempt to retain focus.

Ah, well. I knew this grad school thing was dangerous when I signed up for it.
I’ve been reading mystery author Donald Westlake of late. No particular reason for it – he’s a big name in the genre, plus his books have the ability to be both well-written and fast reads at the same time. It’s been by experience that the more I like a book, the more time I take while reading it; I’m not a slow reader as much as I am a deliberate one. But when it comes to Don Westlake, I’m Jesse Owens.

“The Hook” is a fine example of what I mean – it’s a psychological thriller where two writers – one on the way up and the other on the way down – are unhappy with where things stand in their lives and they conspire to commit murder to solve all their problems. It’s very similar to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and as the novel progresses they get more entangled in each others lives. One of them starts to crack, and the other one has to hold it all together, and Bad Things happen.

Westlake’s been around for a while, and the novel, while written this decade, has a 1970s vibe to it. It’s actually sort of refreshing. (I’m getting tired of novels feeling the need to explain every last character motivation to us. Sometimes in life things happen without all the angsty emo backstory, and that’s okay. We’re readers, we have imaginations, we can handle it.) For example, we know very little of the characters’ internal lives . We only know their thoughts through what they say and what they do. Also, very few of the characters are ever given physical descriptions outside what is essential to the plot: so-and-so wears glasses, or so-and-so has a unruly mop of blonde hair. Again, it’s sort of refreshing.

But wait: the new Anchee Min book just appeared on my hold shelf.  More in a bit.