Tennis Anyone, The Second

To Close
Michon loses to Ram in a tight first set and a not so tight second. Not many weapons. Piña colada ice, Thai dinner.

8:50
Michon is sinister! I mean, a lefty!! Playing a lot to Ram's backhand and trying to construct points. On serve 4-3 in first set.

7:30 PM
Settling in for last full match of day. Could have watched Ricardo Hocevar and Carsten Ball on Court 6, but just didn't find either player all that exciting. So Court 13 has whenever seats, and I know nothing about the French player Axel Michon, who contends against American Rajeev Ram. So the match might be awful, but will have thrill of the new. Did watch a couple games of the Ashleigh Bart match whole waiting for this one to start.

6:50 PM
Shocker! Guccione is up 40-0 serving for a tiebreak at 5-6. And he loses. Five straight points to Pospisil. One is a winning lob off of a net cord, the kind of thing you can't teach that's about instinct and reaction and quick hands. The final point of the match is a double fault by Guccione, which is the srangest of ways to end a match that's been almost all about big booming serves.

6:40 PM
Gootch Guile. Serving at 4-5 Guccione starts to come to the net as often as he cans. This earns him two break points in the 5-5 service game, but Pospisil shows some poise and serves his way out. Another tiebreak moments away...

6:15 PM
Second game second set, Guccione faced two break points and four deuces, but Pospisil couldn't convert. On serve 2-1, but these three games have taken an entire 15 minutes!

6:00 PM
Pospisil wins in a tiebreak 7-5 to take the set 7-6. The latter half of the set had a little more danger with 40-30 games but no deuces or break points. Pospisil clearly has the better ground strokes than Guccione and with his own potent serve is a definite threat and likely to move up quickly. That said, lots of people in the men's game have really strong serves, he hasn't made much of a dent on Guccione's and may be up a set but hardly has this match in hand. The first set flew by in under 45 minutes, a set that goes to a tiebreak will often be an hour long affair, sometimes more, 45 minutes shows how quick these points and games have been.

5:35 PM
different kind of dull, both players have great serves, would be great if there was a radar gun here, neither doing much on the return games, so holding serve 4-3 no break points hardly any rallies.

5:15 PM
So I have no interest in seeing Australian Chris Guccione who has been around a bit without making an impression, but his young Cacadian opponent Vasek Pospisil is supposed to be an up and comer. He had some wins over the summer in main draw, and is the #20 seed in the qualifying.

5:00 PM
Match on Court 10 dull, watching a bit on Court 5 while I wait for things to get underway on Court 6. This is Ireland's Lpuk Sorensen against Spain's Arnau Brugues- Davi. Sorensen won first set in tiebreak. On serve early in 2nd.

4:55
big wooden boxes containing the ESPN "Steve Set," which has magically appeared since yesterday on a platform next to Arthur Ashe stadium entrance.

4:10
what a letdown, the third set went down 6-1 in about as much time as doing my post about the match.
Hard to know when Canadian up and comer Vasek Pospisil will start on Court 6, so I am on Court 10 for the start of Charles-Antoine Brezac (France) vs Daniel Kosakowski (US). If good watch all of it then Australian 15-year old Ashleigh Barty, who is recommended to me by Australian writer Joel Shepherd, will follow. If I don't like this match, will check Court 6 after first set.

3:55 PM
Capdeville now up two breaks. Epic is fizzling in its third act.
Thing I hate most about iPad is that it wants to turn every its into an it's.

3:40 PM
Finally have my epic!
Naso wonmy second match pretty handily, but in a high quality way. In the key games in the second set, both players were winning points with good clean winners.
There was only one choice of match after, which wad the Chilean journeyman Paul Capdeville in warmups on Court 13. Capdeville has been around forever and rarely above the ranks of qualifiers. But at least it was Court 13 with the nice endzone seating, and playing an Israeli, Amir Weintraub, so an opportunity to exorcise Jewish guilt.
It's been a lot of good tennis from both sides. Weintraub went upan early break, frustrating Capdeville, who is the #2 seed and expects to advance But Weintraub couldn't hold on and then played an amazingly sloppy game to cough up the set 6-4 to Capdeville.
At 2-2 in the second set it was Capdeville who got sloppy, but Weintraub then wnetdown 0-40 on his own serve game, came back to deuce, but ultimately lost the game and we stayed even into a tiebreak. Weintraub there had at least three match points at 6-2 orr 6-3, lost them all, but this time recovered to take the breaker 9-7.
So now we are in a third set, but Weintraub again lost focus getting instantly broken in the first game of the final set. Ultimately focus or lack thereof is the difference in the match. Multiple long rallies have ended with a complete mishit by Weintraub, ten or twelve at least. He has had consistent trouble allowing himself to hold an advantage. I do not know if Capdeville is actually better, but he has vast reservoirs of match experience and can take this when its being offered.

1PM
First match ended with a 6-0 second set, ended so early the only choice of next match was next door on Court 5 where another match went by real quick. So I am watching two Italians, Gianluca Naso and Thomas Fabbiano, in a match that looks like an instant replay. Naso had two breaks to take first set 6-2 though it seems it should be closer. Lots of long rallies and good tennis, just that one player is ending up on the winning side way more consistently. One thing for sure, I haven't chosen any great epic matches so far!

11:47 AM
Ilhan has just taken first set 6-2. High quality, both players look good, Ilhan does look 6-2 better.

11:45 AM
is the man two rows back helping, raring or evaluating the ballpersons?

11:25 AM
I got a watermelon ice from the Lemon Ice King onmy way out. Nothing exciting at the Barnes & Noble. Typically mediocre service at Unos, adding ten to twenty minutes to the meal, but the food was what I wanted.

The weather yesterday was about as perfect as you could want for tennis.  Around 78, low humidity, gorgeous. Can't remember when I have visited a water fountain less. Today is a few degrees higher and definitely more humid but still comfy, tomorrow more heat and humidity and a chance of a thunderstorm. 

Rarely are the first round qualifying matches great tennis, and yestefay was no exception. But none of the matches were actually dull. 

Today was a mint chip morning. 

I am settled in on Court 4 watching #3 seed Marsel Ilhan from Turkey against Poland's Marcin Gawron. Looks like some high quality tennis, albeit with a strong chance for trading breaks of serve in the opening games... Yep, traded as I post.

It's still just a cupcake

Maybe I need to get out of town more.

In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next.

I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations.

I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries overturned on the beltway, that anyone should wait 30 minutes for a friggin' cupcake. I noticed they had a new location in Bethesda down the street from the B&N on Bethesda Row, much closer to that B&N than the Georgetown location is to the B&N in Georgetown, and the Bethesda store does a much better business in sf/fantasy than the one in Georgetown, so I expect in the future that I'll go to the Bethesda location, and I did wait five minutes or so the next day. And yes, the carrot cupcake was yummy, and the chocolate/vanilla and the key lime pie and the chocolate mint, even though the icing had kind of run off from the top of the cupcake by the time I ate them back home after taking them around with me for several hours and I had to scoop the icing back on top of the cupcakes.

The original home of the Rockville Pike Borders, which became an Anthropologie when Borders moved down the street into White Flint Mall, is an Anthropologie no more. The store is up for rent, so if any of you want to open a store in a historic retail location on 11500 Rockville Pike... And this huge Borders location no longer has even a single visible store-discretion shelf facing in its Front of Store, nor really does the wonderful Borders on 18th and L have any store discretion that's visible in its FOS. I find this a little depressing. I can remember back 20 years when a Borders had character. Of course, there weren't 500 stores back then. And one of the problems the chain had was that it had too much character and not enough management. And I wasn't very happy with George L. Jones because he didn't run a tight ship. But the nostalgic part of me wishes the chain could be a well-run chain while still retaining some of that store-specific character.

B&N will soon have Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion back on shelves. Should have been there all along, but that's a long story. Maybe I'll tell that story in a blog post some day. That was one of the nice things to see in the stores. The bummer thing is that Borders is underordering on Peter Brett's Desert Spear, around half as many of those as the new Robert Redick hardcover, though I bet Peter will outsell the Redick by about that same margin.

It's soon going to be $8.30 for a one-day pass on the DC MetroRail system. Is it that long ago this was a $5 bargain?

As I get older I get more crotchety about my hotel rooms. I went down twice to ask for a new room because any of the ones facing the air wells on either side, the HVAC equipment at the bottom of the airwell, all that noise just shimmies up the walls. Which leaves a room facing the street so you can get the street noise as the "best" option. I probably won't race to book the Hilton Garden Inn on 14th St. again.

I've never seen so much snow in DC. Knocked over light posts and paper boxes. The sidewalks not so bad but at the corners where snow was plowed from two different streets, you had some interesting detours.

The Pizzeria Uno in Bethesda is closed. And right before I headed to DC, my younger brother told me the one in Manchester, CT is closed now as well. I enjoyed my dinner at the Union Station location. I tried the honey crisp chicken salad for the first time, along with that new moroccan lentil soup, and it was a good thing.

Whole Foods is about to open the new store in Chevy Chase, MD just over the border from DC in Friendship Heights. May 18, I'm told. That's just a little over a mile from the Tenleytown store in DC and not far from the River Rd. location in Bethesda, so I see some same-store cannibalization in the near future. And it's maybe but three years ago that the Tenleytown store was given a pretty major remode. I also see on their web site that the store in Lake Grove, NY will be opening on March 17.

With my little weekend trips the past two weekends when I've been considering myself as on vacation and able to do more than just the Sunday Times crossword, well, I've impressed even myself with how well I've done on the Saturday puzzles. They're not easy, and it takes some backing and forthing and fermenting in the back of the mind while I do other stuff, but I've been very pleased.

I just can't seem to get as much done on a weekend when I'm home.

The More Things Change...

In many ways, Boston is where it all began for me. February 1979, my parents and my younger brother are staying at the Sheraton Boston the same weekend as Boskone, we're allowed into the dealer's room even though we don't have a membership, somebody's pimping free samples of Omni Magazine, before you know it I'm reading stories by Orson Scott Card and George R. R. Martin, getting hooked on the stuff, and some 31 years later I'm one of the leading literary agents for sf/fantasy. There's also the six weeks I spent at Harvard in the summer of 1981 overshooting my allowance on movies, comic books and fantasy and sf novels. So whenever I go to an sf-y something in Boston, it always has a nice extra bit of resonance for me. With not too much lead time, I decided to take a break from NYC and head up to Boskone this year.

So what's up in Beantown?

Since my last visit a few years ago, the good news is that Pandemonium Books in Cambridge survived a scare a few years back when relocation delays led to money problems led to some difficulties with the IRS. The bad news is that the store's book inventory is now mostly new books for the new books, but then mostly used books for the backlist. Better that than not to have the store around at all, and there were customers and a decent crowd in the downstairs gaming room this past Saturday. I did them a favor and suggested they not charge $3.95 for a decent used copy of Beyond the Blue Moon by Simon R. Green, which goes for $16+ on Amazon at the moment.

Pandemonium is the successor to a bookstore on the second floor of a building on Eliot Ave. in Cambridge where I spent many a dollar when I was there in 1981. That building is still around, but now connected to another building with an IHOP where I didn't eat because there was too big a line. I ended up getting Ben & Jerry's for breakfast from their outlet in The Garage, which was the building that housed the previous incarnation of Pandemonium.

I think the Pizzeria Uno in Harvard Square was around in 1981 but too expensive for me to eat at. On this trip, I ate at an Uno's one stop up the Red Line in Porter Square, the 52nd Uno's that I've eaten at. This is in a little shopping mall that may once have been thriving and now is not, and I'm sure once upon a time you couldn't just walk in and find a table on a Friday night. But I must say that the new Moroccan Lentil Soup is one tasty bowl of soup, and with under 200 calories in the bowl. I highly, highly, highly recommend.

The Out of Town News kiosk in the center of Harvard Square was saved from closure a while back, and honestly it may as well go, because it's not even a good version of a US newsstand any more, really, and has about as many out of town newspapers as you'll find at your local Midas outlet. But across the street, the Crimson Corner sundries shop still puts Analog, Asimov's, F&SF, EQMM and AHMM on display right at the front door. If there's ever a tradition you'd think not to have stood the test of time, but somehow or other you still can't walk into this little shop without having a chance to catch up with some good mystery or f/sf fiction.

Besides getting to my 52nd Unos, I took the MBTA out to Dedham Mass to visit the largest Whole Foods in New England, and I believe my 101st of those. I had a very good time. This is in the very busy and prosperous-seeming Legacy Place lifestyle center, which as we can see

here is theoretically going to have a new Borders in it come Summer 2010.

Peeking in through the window...

... and looking at all of the other stores that have opened already at Legacy, you get the unfortunate impression that they decided a while back to maybe take a break from actually building out the store in order to decide if it made more sense to actually build and open the store or find their way out of the lease. I sure do hope the store will be open in the Summer, because this looks like a nice happening place for a Borders, and I do so love being part of the first day excitement at a new bookstore.

The Vinny T's across from the Prudential Center where Steve and I had dinner with Simon Green in 2004 is now closed. I did pop in to the Sheraton Boston in the Pru to pay proper homage to the 2nd floor South Tower meeting room where the hucksters room had been in 1979. Boskone hasn't been at the Sheraton for a while, and the past few years has been in a nice Weston attached to the new convention center in a desolate waterfront area not quite a mile away from South Station. That neighborhood is alas just as desolate as I remembered it being a few years ago, but Boskone itself was a solid convention. Around a thousand people, well run, people seemed to be having a good time. Next year Charlaine Harris will be a special guest, so I will probably be back for more.

The Acela is a nice train, but it is so frustrating not to have real high speed rail in the US. For whatever reason, we had a really pokey train ride up and were 15 minutes late, kind of like being in a car that you know wants to go faster only it can't. The trip was better coming back since the train was actually going at the speed it's supposed to. Except when we had an unscheduled stop just after the bridge from Groton to New London, and sat for 45 minutes because of some signal difficulty. It was still faster both ways than the unelectrified bad old days when the train went slower and had to do an engine change in New Haven, and the seat is nice and comfortable.

I sat in on a couple readings and a panel on the Google settlement. Ya know, folks, Google at least wants to pay authors money. I wish half the energy being spent opposing Google was being spent thinking on ways to deal with piracy and file-sharing and other people and places and companies and things that would rather not pay authors at all. As Jane Yolen and the other panelists pointed out, the Google settlement is flawed.

The flagship Borders on School St. in downtown Boston is still a really nice bookstore selling lots and lots of books. Borders has a new sf/f buyer as the excellent Morgan Burns has been promoted to doing graphic novels and other such things. We'll miss him!

I finally found my way to the Landmark Kendall Square and saw The Last Station. So maybe I'll blog about that.

I didn't get as much work reading done as I'd hoped on the weekend, I never do. But I did catch up on comic books and other fun things, and I did very well on each of the Friday, Saturday and Sunday crosswords in the NY Times.

Basically, it was nice to be in Boston, to look out my hotel window and see the Sheraton Boston across the way, and to walk in to Harvard Yard and look at the staircase where I can remember reading Robert Heinlein in the summer of '79.

Holiday Traditions The Second

I think I kind of fell into my Dec. 24 tradition, two or three parts of me merging into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

1983: I start to eat at Pizzeria Uno, and it kind of sticks. Occasional bad service aside, it's still comfort food for me 26+ years later.

1986: I move into NYC, on the fringe of a neighborhood that has a decent quantity of attached and/or single family houses where people can put out Christmas lights. Or, as I refer to them internally in an interfaith-y kind of way, Holiday Lighting Displays. I realize there are worse things to do than walk around on a December evening admiring the Holiday Lighting Displays.

Early 1990s: Barnes & Noble opens a superstore in Bayside, kind of distant from me and in what is then a "two fare zone" because you need to take a subway to a bus to get there and there are no free transfers. It is a mile or so away from a Pizzeria Uno.

1991: I move to a new neighborhood that's almost all apartment buildings, so it's really hard to get a good Holiday Lighting Displays experience.

So I like to visit the B&N every so often, in part because it's a different market and a different feel than the Manhattan stores are.

So some Dec. 24, it's not like there's anything happening in the office, I have lots of time, so why not go to Bayside. Did I walk all ten miles the first year? Did I take the #7 to Flushing and then walk? Did I just go the B&N on that first visit or do both Uno's and B&N? Details, details, all lost in the haze of time. But I decide to walk back from the B&N to catch the #7 at Main St. Flushing, around a four-mile walk, and then it's a "My God it's full of stars" moment as I realize that I'm walking through a neighborhood full of single family homes, which are full of Holiday Lighting Displays, and I just can't resist admiring them, and admiring them, and admiring them. And it's such a much bigger neighborhood than where I'd lived before.

Whatever happened the first time, the tradition eventually developed its firm elements. If possible, you walk all ten miles from your apartment to the Uno's on Bell Blvd. Sometimes, I may have walked even more by first going down Queens Blvd. to the recently closed Entenmann's outlet store. Leave around noon, get to Uno's before 3pm, so you can have the express lunch. Stay an hour or so, no need to rush, maybe walk along the Bell Blvd. commercial strip before heading down to Bay Terrace shopping center and the B&N. Get to the B&N 4:30 or 5, stay a while, enjoy the panicky announcements that we are closing at 6 and you better get your last minute items or else, enjoy the atmosphere. And then sometime between 5:30 and 6, you leave. You meander the 4 miles to Main St. to catch the #7, except tonight it isn't 4 miles. Because you just go down whatever block you feel like, wherever the Holiday Lighting Displays seem to be the most colorful, most interesting, most alluring. You have all the time in the world. Savor it. Soak it in. Enjoy it. Enjoy the lights. Enjoy the people pulling out and pulling up, arms laden with packages. Enjoy the lights on the trees, and the trees inside visible thru the bay windows. Enjoy the quiet and serenity and uniqueness of this one night. And then enjoy that last hubbub on Main St. as everyone else is heading one way home from the subway station and you are heading the other way.

Some minor variations, maybe. The Cake Box bakery in Bay Terrace went out of business, but then you discover D'Aquila Pastry Shop. Stop and smell the ravioli at Durso's. Try the heavenly hash at Lazar's?

I didn't get out of the apartment on the 24th until 12:26, which makes it a little tight to get to Uno's by 3pm. So in this case, I walked 3.5 or 4 miles to the 103rd St. subway stop, the took the subway 3 stops to Main St. I hoped this might gain me time to buy something at Durso's instead of just smelling the ravioli, but the line was so so so very long that I decided I would make a special trip to Durso's at some point because I really should actually finally buy something there. The walk to 103rd St. was delightful. Not quite the full way to Flushing but certainly the interesting part of it, and I hadn't done it in so very very long so I just looked around as I walked buy, taking in some of the small changes. The very different walk from Flushing to Bayside was a delight. I hadn't done it in so long. Here's an apartment building being fixed up on Roosevelt Ave. There's the IHOP on Northern Blvd and the McGoldrick branch of the library. The old UA Quartet theatre that was a drug store and furniture store for not very long is now an ethnic supermarket. The left turn onto Crocheron Ave., the meander after the Clearview Expressway to the Uno's.

After lunch, it's been so long since I've been in the neighborhood that I decide to take the very scenic route to the B&N, and go down Northern Blvd. to the Joe Michaels Mile along Little Neck Bay. The added distance makes up for the subway ride earlier. The last dribs of sunset reflect from houses on the other side of the Bay. It is getting dark so I can't go to Ft. Totten and double back, so I leave at the Marina for 28th Ave. and up to Bay Terrace. Hey, it's nicer on a crisp fall day or gorgeous glorious spring day, but those opportunities ain't coming so often any more.

No, the lines at the B&N aren't like once upon a time they were. But the announcements are as frantic as always. Hey, there's somebody in the sf section buying Simon Green's Hell to Pay, and they're buying #7 in the series because she's read and liked #1-6. Sweet!

And then I meander. There's always something new in the Holiday Lighting Displays, and this year it's the lettered Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays signs I see in a lot of windows. Of course next year most of those will be gone, like we don't see all of the American flag ornaments I remember on the walk in 2001, but this year everyone has to have one. I set off at least six motion detector lights on houses as I'm walking along. There's a Homer Simpson Clause at this house, a little music going on at that one. More snow-globe type things than I remember Someone calls me on my cell phone and disturbs my serenity to make plans for seeing Avatar. I start thinking we need to finish a filk that starts "Hrathen got run over by a Mistborn, walking home from Vasher's Christmas Eve. You might think there's no such thing as Stormlight, but as for me and Brandon we believe." Durso's was mobbed like always, but there's nobody at D'Aquila's. It's been getting slower and slower there over the years, no twelve people line like I remember. I don't really like Italian pastry that much but for this one night during the year it's nice to do something different. It's a warm enough night that in a concession to age, I rest in Bowne Park for ten or fifteen minutes before doing the final 30-minute walk to Main St. Usually the meander stops at Bowne Park because I'm getting tired and the neighborhood slowly more urban with less to see.

Unlike the 23rd, I enjoyed every single part of this trip as much as ever I had. There's something special about Christmas Eve, just like there was something special 25 years ago to walking along the deserted Diag at U-M on Thanksgiving night. The walk, the lunch, the store, the Holiday Lighting Displays.

I added another element this year, so infused with the spirit, and came home and put in the entire Back to Mono box set, ending with the holiday album.

And the knees that seem to want to get older a little bit quicker than the rest of me are coming up out of the last dip and don't seem to mind the walking from store to store yesterday, or the 18 miles I must have put on the pedometer. No, not something to do every day, but when I rest them up a little bit by doing the bike or the elliptical instead of a walk, I'll feel like I'm rewarding them for a job well done.

Holiday Traditions The First

As my business has grown and I've gotten busier, it's become harder and harder to do a lot of the things I used to do. After a year with more growth, more busy-ness, more challenges both good and bad to what I used to do and used to be, I decided it was important this holiday season to make the time for my two pre-Holiday rituals of yore. I had to touch base with my roots.

Back before Bookscan, I tried to keep tabs on the books I sold, and at some level on the publishers who were publishing them, by running JoshuaScan. I would visit most of the bookstores in Manhattan and a few in Queens, and rigorously track the performance of my titles by eyeballing the shelves and such. The system was fairly accurate, though also subject to ridicule. Publishers could dismiss the information as anecdotal, or fail to recognize that if you poll 1739 people in the US you can predict a presidential race, hence visiting 2% of the B&N superstores in the world was not a bad glimpse into B&N. After Bookscan became available to me, I essentially ran both systems in parallel for at least a year. As the Bookscan info proved to track JoshuaScan pretty nicely, and I had more experience with Bookscan, and my time got more precious, the bookstore visits slowly dwindled. Enough visits to enough stores so I can keep track of things like orders on Bk #2 in a series vs. sales on Bk #1, or what the minimum take was looking like (the minimum take may be the single most important indicator of buyer enthusiasm and publisher-paid placement).

But in any case, one of the things that JoshuaScan eventually evolved into was a Dec. 23 ritual of visiting bookstores in Manhattan from mid-afternoon until the stores closed. I could walk into a busy bookstore and look at a long line and pretend all of those people were buying JABberwocky books. Which was a nice thing to pretend when I was getting by, but not all that much more. I could take the pulse of the list for the holidays. The day would include a visit to the Pizzeria Uno at either E 86th St. or sometimes if I got an early start from the office and could visit the E 86th St. stores and then walk to the west side, the Uno on W. 81st St. And I enjoyed this quite a bit.

Alas, having returned to the tradition this year after skipping (I believe) the past two, I don't think I'll feel an aching desire to keep this tradition going. It started out nicely enough; I got a late start from the office, but the subway was good and I got to the 86th St. Uno's a few enough minutes before 3pm to have the lunch special, which has been part of my life since 1983. But the lines seem less long with each passing year. Fewer shoppers? More registers?? The stores were busy but not mobbed; I didn't find people lingering in the sf section to hand-sell to. The old Lex/86 B&N that was one of the first (and way too small) B&N kind-of superstores is gone now, replaced by a much bigger store that opened in the summer. This was only my 2nd visit after one a few days after opening, a testatement to how I'm not doing the stores the way I used to. As I went from there to the B&N on 82nd/Bway to 66th/Bway to Borders Columbus Circle to Borders Park Ave. to B&N/Citicorp to Midtown Comics (not an official stop!) to B&N 46/5th to Borders Penn Plaza, I slowly came to realize that I was doing all of this solely for the sake of the tradition.

As John Crowley says in the closing lines of his masterful Little Big:

The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

The only thing that gave a frisson of past excitement was finding out that Borders had put in its orders for the mass market of Peter V. Brett's Warded Man rather earlier than expected, so if I asked at the info desk "when is this book coming out," I could be rewarded. In the good old days of JoshuaScan and lots of time, eagerly-awaited orders might have put my plans for a Sunday afternoon aside so I could eagerly add data to my data set. Now, even though I'm still eager, I don't have the time and can say to myself "well, the book will be out in two months, so it's not like I can't get some of the orders into the data set next month." But with a little second wind after strolling down to the Chelsea Whole Foods and getting 1.18 lb at the hot buffet in me I decided I'd walk crosstown to the Borders at Kips Bay to get one more piece of data into me.

But overall, the day just confirmed that my pleasant visits to bookstores are now more and more likely to be when I'm traveling, in less well-trod ground, maybe with a little bit more time just to poke around. My life moving forward won't be what it was looking back...

On the other hand, my Dec. 24 tradition held up very nicely, and that post shall follow anon...

Implausibility and Amiability

So the implausible first...

The Taking of Pelham 123, seen Saturday afternoon June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium #1.  If you Love NY 1 Slithy Toad.  Else 2.

Talk about finding laughs in all the wrong places. 

The 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has its virtues.  The lead performances by Denzel Washington and John Travolta are quite pleasant to watch.  That almost goes without saying for Denzel Washington.  With Travolta, you never know quite what you might get.  But here, he's a good foil, playing a subway train hijacker against Denzel Washington's subway dispatcher.  There are some nice turns in the supporting cast, like James Gandolfini as the Mayor of New York City.  If you can live with the fact that 2009 is simply not 1974 in any way or shape or form, you can accept that the movie is acceptably updated and remade.  Oh, it goes too far.  The first movie ends in an almost anti-climactic and certainly very subtle kind of way, and the new version goes all the way into loud 21st century movie-making.  Something in-between might have been nicer.  

But...

My oh my but...

for all the money and talent and resources that were spent on this, did it have to treat NYC geography so stupidly, so sillily, so cavalierly, so ineptly? 

Some things, you can give the filmmaker artistic license.  My movie-going companion, editor extraordinaire Moshe Feder (he discovered Brandon Sanderson for Tor), noticed which I did not that some of the Grand Central subway scenes were shot at the #7 train platform instead of the Lexington Ave. #6 platform.  That we can live with.

But here is a movie where:

1.  The midtown HQ for the subway system is located at the tip of lower Manhattan in the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

2.  After the #6 train is hijacked, the authorities continue to run express trains on the adjacent tracks.  Even if they don't stop at Grand Central, this is ludicrous.  The Lexington Ave. line would be shut down in the neighborhood.

3.  The captured train goes south from Grand Central to some secret "Roosevelt" station that goes into the Roosevelt Hotel.  Which is North of Grand Central, and not on Lexington Ave.  Except that this secret Roosevelt station leads into the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which has a private platform for the Metro North commuter rail but not for the the subway system.

4.  The movie invents a Brooklyn Federal Reserve bank.  And then the NYC police that I've seen do incredible street-clearing jobs for things like the UN General Assembly somehow manage not to be able to do a decent job of clearing a route for a motorcade carrying $10M from this fake Federal Reserve bank, solely so that there can be Exciting Illogical Crashes along the motorcade route.

5.  It takes less time to drive from the Waldorf to the Manhattan Bridge than it does for a half dozen policeman to walk 20 yds. along the Manhattan Bridge bike/walkway.  

6.  And of course the police don't stop subway trains going across the Manhattan Bridge even though they know that's where the villain is heading.

7.  The hijacked #6 train is somehow going to head off to Coney Island, even though there is no way that  I know of for a train on the Lex. Ave. IRT lines to switch on to any of the lines that go out to Coney Island.

8.  When the train emerges from underground on its way to Coney Island, it does so where the #7 train emerges from the tunnel leading into Main St. Flushing in Queens, with a brief glimpse of Shea Stadium in the background.  Poor Shea Stadium, perhaps its final screen appearance and it has to be here. 

9.  The Mayor takes a train to 57th or 59th St. in order to go to the Staten Island Ferry terminal 5 miles away.

10.  Neither the Mayor nor his aide have a cell phone while riding the subway, so the only way to alert the mayor to what's happening is to have cops run up to an elevated platform and hop on a train just moments ahead of the doors closing.

You get the idea.  

The filmmakers had the money and the cooperation and everything else they needed to make things right, or at least a reasonable version thereof.  And instead, they make it wrong.

I got a lot more laughs out of this than I think I was supposed to.

After a little bit of a break to visit the Barnes & Noble in Forest Hills, I returned to the Midway and saw...

Hangover.  Seen Sat. evening June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium 4.  3 slithy toads.

The Proposal.  Seen Sat. evening June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium 9.  2.5 slithy toads.

Neither of these movies had as many laughs as Pelham 123, but both had me smiling for pretty much their entire duration.  Hangover gets the edge in my ratings because it doesn't wear out its welcome while I was occasionally checking my watch in The Proposal.  Also, Hangover is kind of ludicrous at every level but intentionally so, and when you buy into it you buy into it.  While The Proposal too often stretches plausibility even within the parameters of its premise.

But I enjoyed both and was glad in both instances to have seen.

Some random observations on both...

I haven't seen this mentioned in the reviews I've seen, but Hangover is a comedic retake on a 1998 movie Very Bad Things, which is a much darker but similarly conceptualized Vegas bachelor party gone bad from director Peter Berg, who later went on to such Much Better Things as Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, and Hancock.  Will Hangover director Todd Phillips (Old School) take a similar turn in his career.

Hangover may be one of the best Vegas travelogues I've ever seen, certainly since James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  Oh, a lot of movies do Vegas from the standpoint of a casino, but the views from the Caesar's roof in Hangover are a different animal entirely, sexy and vibrant and seductive in a way that the baccarat table is not.  And you see the city from a gritty street level view as well.

The end credit sequence in Hangover is excellent.  Kept the entire audience in its collective seat, and made it hard for me to watch the credits because I kept wanting to look at the other side of the screen.

Ryan Reynolds grows on me as I see him in movies like Definitely Maybe and The Proposal, to the point that I almost regret not seeing Van Wilder.

We don't see enough of Mary Steenburgen.  I've been fond of her from the earliest days of her screen career in Time After Time and Ragtime, thru her excellent turn in Philadelphia.   She did several films with John Sayles, but it was another Mary, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (also not seen enough) who was in Sayles' Limbo and disappears in Alaska.  Yet I feel as if that Mary disappeared to be reincarnated in Alaska as this Mary here.  Does this make any sense to you?

Yet neither Mary Steenburgen nor Sandra Bullock really seem to be aging, which is one of those unfortunate facts of Hollywood life that women are never supposed to age.  The men can and do, but heaven forbid you age as a woman in this business.

The depiction of the publishing business in The Proposal is probably as unrealistic in its way as the depiction of NYC in Pelham, but this movie isn't really about publishing while Pelham is supposed to be living and breathing NYC.   

After my movies I ate at Pizzeria Uno for the first time in an unusually long time, and it was like comfort food to me.  It's 26 years now since I first treated myself to a sit-down meal at an Uno's, and the one in Forest Hills has the Michigan Daily Weekend section "Best of Ann Arbor" thing on Uno's from 1994.  I love walking into an Unos and seeing this hanging on the wall.  It connects me to my youth.  I would have compiled the campus film listings in that same issue of the Weekend section.

Oh, to be young again.

It was a good day.  I'm still smiling about it.

Oh, a quick final note on the Midway.  This movie theatre on Queens Blvd. in Forest Hills was a semi-grand mid-size movie palace in its day with a very nice lobby.  When I first started to see movies there in 1986 or 1987, it was one of those awful hack job quads.  The two downstairs screens were narrow and tunnel-like leading to small screens at the far end.  The balcony theatres had larger screens but like a lot of those theatres the movie projected from the center out while the balcony seats were designed to face toward the center so you kind of had to tilt your head the entire time you were watching the movie.  Some people in the comment section at Cinema Treasures praise the balcony theatres because those old balconies did have stadium seating, and I don't entirely disagree, but I also never entirely liked the geometry of those balcony twin jobs.  In 1997, the theatre was rebuilt from the ground up.  The lobby was kept, but the theatre beyond was demolished and rebuilt into a surprisingly pleasant 9-screen theatre.  The theatres aren't particularly big, but they all have at least a decent-size screen, the sound is usually good, and the nice lobby with its grand staircase is still intact even though there's a certain modern movie-house tawdriness that detracts some.  It compares quite favorably to some of the fully modern theatres in NYC like the smaller screens at the Kips Bay or the dreadful Kaufman Astoria.  Every time I do get out there I think I should get out there more often, except there isn't a truly large screen like at many of the Manhattan houses, and there's more to do heading in to Manhattan than further out into Queens. 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

For the first time in a long time, much longer than I can remember and this is probably not a good thing, I took four days off where I did not once check e-mail and tried to minimize the amount of time I even spent thinking about the job. I did have around 100 e-mails waiting when I got back, but the world and JABberwocky seem to have survived.

This was to Connecticut to visit with my family. My parents came up for a few days, and the entire family (less one niece in Israel) got together Saturday afternoon for a seven-week preemie celebration of my mother's 80th birthday. I got her the 40th birthday card I neglected to obtain for her the first time around; that's the kind of guy I am.

My mode of transport to CT is usually Metro-North Commuter Railroad to New Haven then Amtrak to Hartford. I could take Amtrak from Penn Station in NY, but Penn Station is such a pit of existence while the New Haven train station is so nice that I'd rather have time to kill in New Haven if need be. If I have lots and lots of time to kill in New Haven and my luggage isn't too heavy to walk with, I can walk a mile over to the downtown/Yale area. It adds a little time to the trip, but not necessarily a godawful amount, especially since it's slightly quicker for me to get to Grand Central to catch Metro North. And sometimes it's quicker as when on the way back Sunday night the connecting train from Boston to New York was running very very late.

I visited my 73rd and 74th Whole Foods Markets. #73 is in Glastonbury, CT and I was visiting just shy of its 4-month anniversary. It's a "just right" location, big enough for the prepared foods to have some specialness but not so big (like the one in Columbus OH I visited with Tobias Buckell) you wonder where all the customers are supposed to come from. This store has its own in-house bake-house, and while I was there they were taking a big huge disk of dough that looked like some monster from a science fiction movie and turning it into cranberry pecan (I think) rolls. I sampled a four-cheese sourdough bread that was really yummy, and if I thought my younger brother and his family were more the types to enjoy artisanal bread maybe I would have gotten some. The store also makes a sublimely delicious white chocolate brownie that is so good it almost makes me want to move to Glastonbury so I can fatten myself up. The 74th I count with reluctance since it's an old Wild Oats location that was one of the first to be rebranded as a Whole Foods post-merger. Apparently the merger is still a work in progress; I was told by the Prepared Foods Team Member who dished up my small dish of Pete's Ravioli that there's talk of a renovation but who knows when, and that since the store looks the exact same as it did only the contents of the shelves are different that people don't really know if it's a Wild Oats or a Whole Foods or a what. It was very quiet on a summer Sunday while the "real" Whole Foods two miles away in West Hartford center was bustling when I shopped there an hour or two later. Part of me says I shouldn't count the Wild Oats as a Whole Foods, but the sign says Whole Foods and the food on the shelf is Whole Foods, and as I visit other parts of the country (like Denver for WorldCon) I'm not going to know which are conversions and which are real and as they do more renovating the gaps will close. So I'll count them.

Trivia note that Bishop's Corner had one of the earliest B&N superstores before they built them quite as super. It's now closed. There's a new store in West Hartford Center in the Blue Back Square development, and one right across the street from the Borders in Farmington that is always very very quiet compared to the Borders. The staff roster for that B&N on Sunday had only 4 bookseller/cash wrap people on it, so they weren't expecting a throng.

I dump a lot on Borders in this blog, but here to dump on B&N a bit: can anyone explain why the Glastonbury and West Hartford locations of B&N do not have a model on and are not carrying Brandon Sanderson's MISTBORN? This is inexcusable. The publisher will tell me how B&N loves Brandon and sells tons and blah blah blah, and I don't want to hear it. The time they spend trying to justify this for B&N, I'd wish they would spend getting on B&N's case, that, like, in case they haven't noticed, Brandon is one of the top-selling fantasy writers in the country these days, in fact THE WELL OF ASCENSION was Tor's top selling fantasy mass market two weeks ago according to Nielsen Bookscan, and I shouldn't have this overhanging my vacation. Sad to say, this isn't something unique to Tor. There's a form of regulatory capture that takes place in the dynamic between the sales reps at the major publishing houses and the buyers at the major chains just like between the airlines and the FAA. So don't get me started. Today it's B&N, Tor and Brandon, a couple years ago Penguin, Borders and Charlaine Harris, somebody else tomorrow, and some people who've spent time with me know that I can go on about these stupidities at very great length.

The Pizzeria Uno at the WestFarms Mall has closed. This was one of the earliest of the Unos I visited, a fixture on visits to the CT area for me for many many years. PF Chang's is taking over the spot and I'm sure will make the Mall feel much happier with itself, but I will miss the Unos. Happily there is still one by the Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester on the other side of Hartford. There is a general feeling of ennui toward Friendly's amongst my family. Smaller scoops of ice cream, inferior food, not like we remember it. But is it them or our memories that are faulty?

I attempted to play things on a Play Station and did not do very well. Too many buttons. I'm not fast-fingered enough on the quiz game. The karaoke game doesn't do it for me. I did better at Wordigo, which is a word game I would recommend. It's a kind of multi-player solitaire word game.

The blueberry picking wasn't up to snuff. Most years I've been up closer to the 4th of July when the blueberry patch is just opening and there are clusters and clusters that are ready to fall into the bucket. A little harder to find those two weeks in to the season. Lots of fun, still, and it's not like the berries were bad, but it's definitely worth keeping in mnd for next year that earlier in the season is better.

Bradley Airport in Hartford is looking rather shabby. There are some transit systems that use letters for buses and some that use numbers and some that use both, so why does CT Transit think their Hartford bus system will be much the wiser for their expense of converting from letters to numbers?

So them's a few musings inspired by my vacation.