The Movies of Octoberone

August and September were very busy months for me; I managed to squeeze in several movies in August but September I saw only 2, which is amazingly low for me.  Many years ago when I had more leisure I saw around 120 movies a year, and even now I still average close to 2 per week.  2 per month, though, yikes!  And those I went to because I was able to see free screenings courtesy of Variety Screening Series and Museum of the Moving Image.  And of those 2, I wish I hadn't wasted my time at Blindness.  Sadly, Frozen River and Traitor are two movies I wish I'd seen that came and went before I could get to see.  But as I've slowly dug out from underneath I've been able to balance movies and work and some forward progress in my reading pile for work with several movies.

Ghost Town, seen at the Regal Kaufman Astoria, aud. #8, 1 slithy toad.

Eagle Eye, also at the Kaufman, #4, 3 slithy toads.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist at the AMC Empire, aud #18, 1 toad.

Religulous @ the Empire #19, 2.5 toads

Lakeview Terrace at the AMC Loews 34th St., #11, 2.5 toads

Appaloosa at the 34th St. #5, 1.5 toads

Towelhead at the City Cinemas Angelika, #5, 1 toad, or 3 toads, or 2 toads, or I don't know how many

Office Space at the AFI Silver #1, 2.5 toads

Burn After Reading at the Landmark Bethesda Row #3, 2 slithy toads

The Pool at the Landmark E St. Cinemas #6, 1.5 toads

From worst to best...

Ghost Town and Nick and Norah both share the same flaw, that they're so flat and so essentially dull that I decided to take a nap during each.  While the reviews on both were mixed, both did have their share of positive notices, and I just can't figure out why.  The kinds of screwball comedies Ghost Town tries to channel were fleet and fast and sophisticated.  This movie thinks sophistication requires no more than Greg Kinnear in a tux.  Ricky Gervais is like a 45 playing as a 33.  During the moments I was awake, I kept wondering why none of the ghosts had died in their PJs.  Don't many people die in their sleep, yet all of them died at work or home.  Or did they get a change of clothes on their way to Ghost Town?  Why did Andrew Wheeler like Ghost Town?  Were the parts I slept through that much better?  Nick and Norah tries to channel something like Scorcese's After Hours only done by way of teen romantic comedy, only there's no chemistry between Michael Cera and Kat Denning, whose smile seems torturously forced throughout.  They try kind of so hard to be NYC hip and film in NYC but the ending makes no sense because the 5th Avenue address would be some upscale apartment building where I'm positive Where's Fluffy will not be found.  They discriminate against bookstores by filming at the corner of 8th St. and Avenue of the Americas but away from the B&N where Brandon Sanderson will be signing and only toward the Gray's Papaya.  

Appaloosa gets 1.5 toads.  I'd kind of like to give it at least 2 because the cast has so many people worth seeing, but at the end of of the day and as amiable as it is there's just no point to it, and I have to be a little harsh.  There's also voice-over narration at the beginning and end, and the lines at the end I hated.  They insist on declaiming what any reasonably intelligent watcher of the movie should be able to get from the film itself, which reflects either a lack of confidence by the filmmaker or a lack of respect for the audience's intelligence.  The Pool also gets 1.5 toads.  My sister really liked it, so I decided I could see it while I was down in DC before my train back, and then I read her second e-mail "remember we have different tastes in movies and you won't like this," and she was right about that.  Set in India.  Nice teenager working at a hotel doing maid work and handyman work and etc.  Friends with a slightly younger boy who works at a restaurant.  There's a pool house next to the hotel, older boy falls for the daughter of the family that visits from a bigger city for the summer.  They have adventures with and without the younger kid who may be somewhat jealous, summer ends and lives have changed.  There's some nice cultural stuff going on, but I feel as if this same movie if done as Amerindie cinema wouldn't go anywhere and that the people who like it including not only my sister but also Stephen Holden in the NY Times are giving it extra credit because it's shot in India and thus exotic.  For my part I think 1 toad might be more like it, but out of respect for my sister's opinion I've given it a half-toad raise.

Burn After Reading is worth seeing and worth not seeing, hence 2 toads.  Considering I don't like the Coen Brothers all that much, this counts as a rave.  Basically, the cast is really good, with George Clooney and Brad Pitt and John Malkovich and Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton and JK Simmons, so it's fun to watch on that account.  The critics have lambasted it in some instances (and certainly by comparison to their usual unadulterated encomiums of praise for the Coen Bros) because they say it's not likeable, but that's more often a problem in the movies the critics like than in this one which they liked less.  It's very hard not to like a Brad Pitt or George Clooney, and none of the cast are working overtime at being unloveable in this movie.  More accurate to say that the movie drifts along until it reaches a random ending after a lot of random plot events.

Religulous and Lakeview Terrace are both a tad above average on my toad scale.  Lakeview Terrace is directed by Neil LaBute, whose plays I've often loved (The Shape of Things, Fat Pig) but who is less consistently successful on stage.  The script is co-written by playwright Howard Korder whose 1988 drama Boys' Life has just been revived in NYC.  It has elements of cheesier landlord/tenant horror thrillers like Pacific Heights but overall does I think hold to a slightly higher plane in putting within the context of race relations and parenting and other more issue-related angles.  Another movie  that gets points for having good cast members; Samuel L. Jackson is a plus in even the most negative-filled movie.

I'm not sure why I'm not giving Religulous a higher rating.  Though I attend Sabbath service more often than not over the course of the year I am very wary of the extremes in pretty much any and every religion which can meet on the left and right in some very scary places, which is ultimately Maher's point.  His interview at a company that specializes in making "shomer shabbas" products for Jews resonates very deeply with me.  Under Jewish law there are lots of specific things you can't do on the sabbath, but because some of these can be very inconvenient even many very religious Jews can find many ways to try and circumvent.  When if ever can you go so far to try and circumvent the rule as to in fact be breaking it?  When if ever can you go so far as to make a mockery of the self-righteousness that some very observant Jews have toward those who are less so?  These can be real issues in my family where there are five siblings who received very similar backgrounds in Judaism but who go thru life now at every point on the scale from agnosticism/atheism to orthodoxy.  One example to me is a concept known as an "eruv."  You can't carry things outside your home on Shabbat, but there is this idea that if you put a very big string around something you can define it as your home.  The Jewish summer camp I went to had this eruv strung up around its whole grounds and it would be checked every Friday afternoon to be sure it was intact, and in that context it seemed not an unreasonable thing, but it does strike me as unreasonable to have an eruv around the entire island of Manhattan.  So some rabbis say the whole idea is ridiculous, some say if you can have an eruv you can have one as big as you please, I'm in the middle, and we're all reading the same source material.  In the Religulous section, the company shows off a phone with a special Shabbas phone that dials all the numbers constantly, so when you hit a number you stop the phone from dialing which somehow makes the number dial which somehow makes it OK.  My religion isn't the only one that presents questions like these.  How do you buy a house if your religion forbids mortgage interest?  The Washington Post has had some articles on this topic which I'd link to except they're buried in a pay-to-access archive.  I love the topic, watching Real Time With Bill Maher is one of the nice side benefits of needing HBO for True Blood, and I like the movie, but I just don't love it.

I feel awkward to give Eagle Eye the same rating as Rachel Getting Married because they're so different and one is like so clearly an entry in the good movie sweepstakes.  But Eagle Eye succeeds every bit as admirably in its efforts as Rachel Getting Married, and I enjoyed both quite a bit.  Eagle Eye does borrow from a zillion other fllms ranging from Enemy of the State to 2001 to multiple Alfred Hitchcock to Wanted (well, it couldn't have borrowed from that since it wasn't released).  Unlike the movie Stargate, which borrows from 12 other movies in a boring kind of a way, Eagle Eye does it in a lively and energetic way.  It has Shia LaBeouf who really does deserve to be the next big thing that he's becoming.  I've liked him so much where I have seen him that I've come to regret not seeing Holes.  There's real chemistry between him and Michelle Monaghan, unlike what we find in Nick and Norah.  It's all very ludicrous but I was entertained entirely throughout, and it gives value more money.

I think I may do a full separate post on Towelhead, which is a little too interesting to get a quick paragraph at the bottom here.

Rachel Getting Married

Seen Monday evening September 29, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Auditorium #1, 3 Slithy Toads

I was so quick to post negatively about the first film I saw in this year's Variety Screening Series that I should have been much quicker to enthuse about Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married."  But better late than never.

Jonathan Demme's had a very uneven career as a director, from the excellent and energetic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and film adaptation of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, on to Married to the Mob and Something Wild (not bad, though others love more than I), continuing to The Silence of the Lambs and the excellent Philadelphia to The Truth About Charlie remake (which I love more than others) to a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (which needed better tighter editing; even scene seemed to last a beat too long making it rather a chore) and now to Rachel Getting Married, which I think might be up there with Philadelphia as his best narrative motion picture.

Much like Philadelphia is and will always be known for the excellent central performance of Tom Hanks, Rachel Getting Married will be known for the excellent central performance of Anne Hathaway.  Sadly so, almost, because just as Philadelphia boasts a slew of excellent supporting performances, like Mary Steenburgen's delicious performance as the evil attorney, Hathaway's star turn will likely overshadow the excellence of the cast up and down the line here.

But goodness is Anne Hathaway good!  She plays Kym, the sister of the eponymous Rachel, whose wedding weekend it is.  We know from the conversation in the car ride up to the wedding in ritzy Stamford CT with her father that there's something a little awry with Kim, which we'll soon enough find out is her drug dependency.  All of the other reviews I've read mention that she's on a weekend furlough for the wedding, but this seems to be the kind of thing you pick up from the press kit that isn't so well described in the film itself.  There's another secret about Kym that's a little more important and a little better hidden that's revealed slowly and gently, a line of dialogue here and a photo there and a plate in yonder kitchen cabinet.  And is it Kym's fault that her mother and father have split up, the mother ephereally and ephemerally played by Debra Winger in a nice supporting turn that (to continue with my comparison) isn't unlike the late-career glimpse of Joanne Woodward as Tom Hanks' mother in Philadelphia.  The father's played by Bill Irwin, who is perhaps better known to we  New Yorkers for some of his Broadway clowning.  He uses every bit of his expressiveness to convey the uncertainties of his own balancing act on the wedding weekend, and Rosemarie DeWitt's Rachel is similarly expert showing sometimes with raised voice but often with her face just what's it like to have to deal with Kym on a weekend that ought to be about her.  Both also have to ac with a lot of delicacy, because we're going to look at things they do before we find out Kym's other little secret and ask just how well they fit.

Films like this can sometimes be difficult for me, because I'm not fond of addictive personalities, and I don't enjoy seeing what people can do when they're drugged up or drunk.  I'm a little more tolerant of varieties of drugged up because I've seen less of that in my own life, so thank heavens it's drugs here and not drunks which in high school and elsewhere I've had my fill of.  Furthermore, there's nothing very glorious about Anne  Hathaway, other than that she's absolutely and totally magnetic to watch even as she does and says the darnedest and damnedest things on occasion.  And it's just a magnificent performance, definitely an Oscar contender.  She's hurt and hurtful, cuddly and hateful and hateable all at the same time.

The centerpiece of the movie might be a rehearsal dinner capped by a toast by Kym. We were told in the post-film Q&A that all of the script (by Jenny Lumet, the daughter of the noted director Sydney Lumet) is in the movie and that 90% of the movie is in the script but a good chunk of the 10% that's improvisation is contained in this long section.  Kym's toast is a cringe-worthy moment in the best possible way, because we're not sure where Kym is going or what she's going to say, and it's early enough with enough left unsaid about Kym to this point that what she does say can be looked at a lot of different ways and then maybe in six more when you talk about the movie afterward.  It's selfishly gracious, or is it graciously selfish?  Later on, with all cards on the table, there's a scene between Debra Winger and Anne Hathaway that's also devastatingly well done. 

This isn't a perfect film.  The stuff about Kym that's better found in the press notes than the movie is one small reason for that.  A bigger one that results in the deduction of half a toad is the very self-indulgent wedding reception.  Demme likes his music, so the film is filled with music and musicians (in fact, all the music in the film is sourced, on a radio or there live or such instead of scored), and they're all at the wedding reception.  And since they're all there, they must be shown.  Even though the dramatic climax of the film has already been reached, and we've had our wedding, and we're hungry for the epilogue.  And this just drags on.  And on.  And on.  And on.  And on some more.  

Perfect, no.  But very very good.  Often in ways that American films simply aren't good at being good at any more, and at the same time mostly without falling prey to some of the cliches of Amerindie cinema.  

True Blood, True Life

One of my pet peeves in movies and TV shows has to do with funeral scenes.  I don't have a "funeral suit" in my closet, some black suit with a black tie and a white shirt that I can drag out on a day's notice in the unfortunate and unwanted event that I need to mark someone's passing. Do you?  Yet it's this awful cliche in Hollywood that the real world is full of people young and old who either have that special suit in their closet or run out and buy.  You look at a group of mourners, and they're all there in a funeral suit.  I'm not going to go to a funeral in my gaudiest ensemble, but nor am I going to go in a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie.

So three cheers for Episode #6 of True Blood.  There's a funeral in this episode, and the characters are dressed like actual real people at most of the actual funerals of real people I've attended in my life.  One of the relatives is in a suit, but it's a blue suit with a loose tie.  A friend of the family is in an ensemble that looks like the kind of thing the character might actually have had in his closet.  Some of the people aren't wearing ties at all.  They're dressed respectfully,appropriately, but not like a lazy falsified version of the real world.  

And I'm a little bit biased about True Blood, obviously .

As an aside, and in response to a commenter from last week, yes, Borders does have an endcap for Charlaine Harris now, running thru the end of November, and has ordered lots and lots of books and even put in lots and lots of reorders as books sold over the first few days of the promotion; Barnes & Noble stores have gotten six-packs of the backlist and some may have a floor riser, but for a lot of these stores that might be only a one-week supply and after that I'm not so sure.  A Sookie box set will be out for the holidays!

Biased, but easy enough just to blog about other things and ignore if not for the fact that I'm really liking the show.  Charlaine had gotten a DVD of the first five episodes and told me the show got better with each one, and ya know, she's right.  Episode #4 had some squirmy funny business going on with Jason that I couldn't bare to watch and yet couldn't avoid enjoying.  Episode #5 was a tight rope act with some scenes that were really funny mixed with some scenes that had very strong emotional pull to them and the balance was just right.  Episode #6 was more tightly focused on the immediate ramifications of the death that cliff-hung at the end of the prior episode, but suffice to say that the funeral dress is far from the only thing worth praising.  We're seeing more and more of Jason's darker side so I'm loving him less than I was at the start, but that's a reflection of the approach to the character.  Anna Paquin has been superlative and continues to be spot-on.  Bill is growing on me.  

Six more episodes to go, the season finale slated for Nov. 23, and if things continue on this level I'll have a lot to give thanks for come Nov. 27.

Notes & Comments

The e-book revolution is finally starting to arrive, this time legitimately for real.  The royalties I received from Penguin at the start of October were around 15% attributable to e-book sales, and several books had sold hundreds of e-book copies, a good deal of which are attributable to the Kindle. Compared to a mass market paperback, e-book royalty rates are higher and the e-book dollars are disproportionate to the actual number of copies sold.  However, if the e-book revolution eventually leads to $10 e-books selling instead of $25 hardcovers it will lead to a loss in revenue to the Author.  The Sony Reader is coming out in a new and improved edition, which will still retain its Mac-unfriendliness but allow annotations and note-taking as currently on the Kindle.  There have also been glimpses of a 2nd-generation Kindle which may arrive in early 2009.  

The NY Times reports that consumer spending is down.  Bookstores are not immune to this, alas.  Looking over the Nielsen Bookscan numbers for JABberwocky over the past couple weeks, a lot of backlist titles seem to have fallen to record low sales weeks.  This is not a good thing.

At least here, we are able to enjoy the Charlaine Harris phenomenon.  7 Sookie Stackhouse books on the NY Times list this week, 7 again next week.  The odd thing is that this is happening even though the books can be hard to find in stores.  It looks like this will begin to settle down in the next week or two; Borders as an example is putting huge reorders in to stock an endcap that will last thru November, and I'm told B&N has floor displays to come.  Still, it's been an odd thing the past month to have so many books on the bestseller list without having the visual component of seeing them in large glorious quantity on shelves. 

Funny Book Blindness

Blindness; seen Tuesday evening September 23, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Auditorium #1.  0 slithy toads.

& many comic books, some read during this awful awful movie.

Going to see a "free" screening of the forthcoming movie Blindness, courtesty of the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the Variety Screening Series, is an excellent example of the economic concept of opportunity cost.

I had walked out of the director's (Fernando Meirelles) earlier, wildly overpraised and stunningly bad movie City of God.  I hate to walk out of movies, but not only was it very bad, but it was in a foreign language so I couldn't kind of rest my eyes and maybe listen a little to it even if I didn't care about what was on the screen.  This one was in English, so even though I knew I was in for a long night after the first half hour, I decided there was just enough light at my seat (which was on the aisle, near one of the lights in the aisle that didn't go down all the way so people could walk to the bathroom and concession stand without killing themselves) to read comic books during the movie.

So let me interrupt this review of the movie to talk about comic books:

Ex Machina 38, 3 slithy toads, is the latest issue in an always entertaining DC/Wildstorm series about New York, 9/11, people talking to machines, politics, relationships and much much more.  This issue derives some from the 2004 Republican convention in New York as the superhero mayor is under pressure about his participation.  It has some flashbacks, some flash forwards, some intriguing asides, and was vastly more entertaining than the movie.

Un-Men 13, 1 slithy toad for old time's sake, is the last issue of this Vertigo season that started off intriguingly though I'm guessing with not too many readers since it is now expired, but kind of lost its way after the first story arc.  I read this issue thinking it might be my last because it was just getting to be kind of confused and hard to follow and not good enough to put in the effort to follow, and then got this inkling that maybe I didn't have to worry since this was like The Exterminators and Infinity Inc. and other DC series that had recently ended.  The Exterminators also died creatively in its final issues but put up a good fight; it goes with some fond memories from me.  Infinity Inc. I read for only a handful of issues.

DC Universe: Decisions #1, 2.5 slithy toads.  Perfectly adequate, maybe even a little more, an extra point or two for being one of the few series I can remember other than Paul Chadwick's Concrete to take even a vaguely real world approach in a superhero comic book to politics.  The Justice League lends a hand when a conspiracy to assassinate presidential candidates is discovered, using suicide bombers who clearly had no idea what they were doing at the time (maybe a point or two off for that one depending on how it plays out).  Green Arrow ends up endorsing the candidate he is supposed to be guarding.  Light weight, fun, I'll stick with.

Now, back to the movie...

It's based on a novel by Jose Saramago that came out in the mid 1990s.  Some kind of something starts to make people go blind, but not in the usual way.  They see white instead of black, one character describes it as all the lights being turned on when we think of blindness as all the lights going off.  The eye doctor the first victim sees also comes down with this as does his receptionist and someone at the pharmacy one victim goes to and a kid in the waiting room and etc. etc.  The government sends them into quarantine, where they are treated like poor people being evacuated from New Orleans during a hurricane.  The people in ward #3 start to extort things, first watches and then women, in exchange for food.  Things get bad and worse and worser still, buried bodies piling up (down?) in the courtyard, until suddenly the guards all go away, the victims can roam free in a miserable post-Blindness ward where looting for groceries can be hazardous to your health, and then the whatever-it-is goes away and victim #1 regains his sight.  

Problem #1 for me was that I didn't care about any of the characters, which was also a major problem I had with City of God.  Movie starts out with guy getting ill, a guy whom we don't know anything about at all, and then in a six degrees kind of way the people he's in contact with and they're in contact with and they're in contact with all go blind.  Then we kind of get a very long and very boring reenactment of Lord of the Flies, only it's blind people in quarantine instead of kids on island but either way it's no more than something I read in high school 30 years ago and hardly need read again to get the point of it.  So that's problem #2.  Problem #3 is all of the plot loopholes.  The movie is just intent on this Lord of the Flies stuff so it doesn't need to explain anything about the blindness itself which would divert from Lord of the Flies.  It doesn't need to explain why the eye doctor's wife is so in love to join him in quarantines which no one else who isn't ill tries to do which makes Joan of the Seeing of Arc, but which we're hardly supposed to notice.  It doesn't come close to defending the idea expressed at one point that it is a thing of great virtue and courage to volunteer to get raped by Ward 3 so that the guys in your ward can chow down.  The one thing it does away with real quick is to explain how nobody notices the doctor's wife can see. One soldier remarks on her ability to find a shovel when he's hotter/colder-ing her away, and his CO says "the blind adapt quickly."  So we can stop worrying about that.

The 7:30 screeing started late, the credits go on forever like those in Superman The Movie so the 1:50 movie becomes 2:00, I usually like to stay for the Q&A at these things except I haven't had dinner, but I end up staying a little while and stand in the back while Danny Glover and Mark Ruffalo from the cast join the screenwriter Don McKellar (also in cast) and the director for a discussion led by Variey reporter Gordon Cox.  

The stunning thing to me is that they purposely intended every misguided element of this movie.  The director starts to say how wonderful it is that it takes place in an anonymous city with anonymous characters you won't care about because it enables the movie to give its full devotion to the stuff about civilation's veneer fading so quickly in the harsh conditions of the quarantine wards.  And in order to do this, they paid Mark Rufallo for a week to learn how it is to be blind, even though the blindness in the movie is nothing but what Hitchock called a MacGuffin.  I was too appalled to continue listening, and went down the street to the Tribeca Whole Foods to grab some chow, and then I finished up some more comics while eating and heading home.

The opportunity cost of this movie was very high to me.  I had to traipse to one of the most distant movie theatres in Manhattan.  I did enjoy the walk thru Greenpoint and Williamsburg and over the Williamsburg Bridge, which took no more than five minutes more than the usual route of heading over the 59th St. Bridge and then straight down 2nd Ave. to the Sunshine.  It was a nice fall day.  I gave up almost 4 hours of my life to the screening, 2 for the movie and 45 minutes to the late start and the discussion, and then they insist we get there by 7PM to be sure our seat won't be given away even though they don't even start checking the guest list until 7:05 and there are empty seats.  And all the other things I could have done with those 4 hours...  It's even more tragic to think of the millions of dollars spent getting a talented cast to film a movie in five or more cities on three continents from Brazil to Guelph Ontario to Japan.  That, too, has an opportunity cost.

House of Mystery #5 continues a hard to describe Vertigo series that updates the old horror anthology title DC published many many years ago.  I like it; and no doubt it's another of those Vertigo series that my friend Larry at DC will say is being enjoyed by myself and six other people.  But I like it.  2.5 slithy toads.  Will stick with.  

Air #2, 3 slithy toads, is another of those strangely intriguing Vertigo comics.  In issue #1 a stewardess falls in love with a rakish man who may or may not be a terrorist being chased by another group of men who may or may not be terrorists themselves, and now she and a steward colleague and a matronly grandmotherly landlady type all go off to the land of Narimar that may or may not exist in the northern reaches of India, where the boyfriend is being held by the chasers who may have some Device in the neighborhood.

Greatest Hits #1 is a Vertigo series that does not work.  Great concept:  imagine the Beatles as a superhero quartet.  Instead of giving concerts in Shea they fight riots in Newark in 1967.  I cared more about the filmmaker son of one of them who may or may not participate in a documentary which may or may not be this comic book in an effort to escape creative exile 8 years after a Sundance hit.  I don't care enough about him and he isn't major enough in the story to buy the next 5 parts of this miniseries.  1 slithy toad.

Simpsons Comics #146 gets only 1.5 toads.  It's an off issue of this long-running comic, but the on issues are so good that I'm always willing to buy the next.  Marge becomes a roller derby performer, Lisa has to teach her life lessons with the help of a banished derby queen from many years ago.  enh.

Wasilla on my Mind

In light of recent events, I thought I would share with you a small excerpt from an e-mail I sent about my trip to Alaska for Bouchercon in September 2007:

The next morning, I watched one of Charlaine Harris' panels, and then met up again with my author friend for a sightseeing expedition.  The usual thing is to go South toward Portage Glacier, Homer, Seward, Girdwood.  I suggested we head the other way to Wasilla, Alaska.  Because there was a Waldenbooks there!  It was another gorgeous day, and we drove along with the Chugach Mountains on one side of us, and the Alaska Range lurking off a little in the distance, with some fall foliage maybe just the tiniest tinge past its peak.  Wasilla/Porter Alaska have around 70K of the 350K people that live in the "Anchorage Bowl," which in turn has around half of the population of Alaska.  When we were driving along the main drag and passed by a strip mall with a sign for the "Alaska Cheesecake Company," I said we had to stop.  I come from NYC, we have cheesecake here, and I had to see what these upstarts were.  The owner was very glad to see us.  I got two cheesecake cupcake sampler packages, one for me and one for my host, and we were her first customers of the day, and spent about as much as she'd taken in the entire day before when she said it had been pouring rain all day.  Her rent was $1800/month (well under $2/square foot) which the owner of the used bookstore in the same strip mall thought was quite extravagant on a square foot basis, while I was quite amazed because this was so much less than any kind of rent you get in NYC.  And it looked as if the typical take for the cheesecake business was maybe $200 per day.  In any case, it was surprisingly good cheesecake; I enjoyed my cheesecake cupcakes immensely.  Sadly, they don't have a web site.  The Waldenbooks itself was revelatory.  It's hardly the biggest I've been in, but it had well over 50 titles of mine on its very crowded shelves, twice as many as the LI stores and a good 25% more than the nice store near Seattle, and in fact more than any Waldenbooks I've ever visited.  70,000 people, and they either buy their books at this little Waldenbooks, at the grocery store, or drive 45 minutes or an hour to Anchorage.  We had lunch at an Italian-y restaurant that was praised in my Fodor's for its large calzones, and mine was good.

I doubt that the Waldenbooks will have as robust a selection today because of the inventory cutbacks at Borders, and I do not know if Governor Palin ever shopped there.  The store has some new competition from Pandemonium Booksellers.  The Alaska Cheesecake Company still does not have a web site that I can find, otherwise I would link and suggest you all send away for cheesecake.  I think Evengelos was the name of the restaurant where I had yummy calzone.  Not being able to divine the future, I did not devote sufficient time to exploring the ice-skating rink/sports complex or the Wasilla library or any of the major tourist sites now in the news.  I have nothing else to say on the subject of Wasilla.

To Live and Die in LA, Part 2

The one thing I couldn't do on a car-less visit to LA was head out to the suburbs to visit bookstores.  So I decided on this visit to pursue a costly but pleasant alternative, hiring a media escort to join me for 8 hours of exploration.  What is a media escort?  When an author goes on tour, the escort is the person the publisher hires to meet an author at the airport, get an author to the hotel, to the event, to any media that might be planned in the market, and as time permits to do drive-by stock signings at stores besides the one where the event is taking place.  Ann Binney was recommended to me by Tina Anderson, the wonderful publicist at Penguin who recently, and sadly, departed after offering a lot of assistance to Charlaine Harris and other authors of mine.

We agreed to meet at the Mission St. stop on the Gold Line light rail, so I started the morning walking from the Marriott to Union Station to catch the train.  I went a few blocks the other way to walk along 7th St., and then north on what was called "historic Spring St.," one block east of Broadway.  There aren't really enough signs on historic Spring St. to explain why it is, just one that I found on the north end that mentioned that it was the Wall St. of the West, and which spoke about the historic buildings still on the street.

The light rail arriving at Union Station with the morning commuters was standing room only with hardly room for another passenger.  A little less crowded in the reverse direction, and a pleasant ride up.  After carefully considering whether to add bookstores in the San Fernando Valley or in Orange County to my tally lists, I'd decided to do the OC, in part because it seemed like unfinished business from two years ago when I'd been in Anaheim for WorldCon without making it a relatively short distance down Harbor Blvd. to do the Costa Mesa bookstore thing.  So we headed South, starting off at the Borders in Cerritos, and then along to the B&N in Orange, the B&N and Borders in Tustin (stopping at the Whole Foods in Tustin for lunch), the Borders in Costa Mesa, the B&N and Borders at/near South Coast Plaza, and then the B&N in Huntington Beach and the Borders on Bellflower in Long Beach.  Almost all of these were stores I'd never been to before.  The Borders in Cerritos was relocated from my prior visit in the late 1990s, which was also the last time I'd visited the Long Beach Borders.  The Cerritos store is a very low volume one, the Long Beach one a prosperous one where authors of mine have signed, and the B&N in Huntington Beach clearly the f&sf leader of the stores visited.  In fact, Brandon Sanderson will be signing there in October, along with stops at Dark Delicacies and the Borders in Torrance.  But the most enjoyable and pleasant of the stores we visited was the South Coast Plaza Borders, where I found huge staff recommendation displays for Brandon Sanderson courtesy of  Jaeson.  Jaeson wasn't working that day so I left a note to thank him for his support, and also said hi to Brian, another big fantasy fan at the store.  Jaeson gets extra kudos from me for being the only bookseller I've left a note for to actually send a follow-up e-mail to me.  Did they not pass the notes along at other places, do people not care?  I just get really really happy when I go to a store where there are big fans for a JABberwocky author.

I hated to part company with Ann. It was wonderful to have someone to share the day, and I can only hope she survived having to hear my stories (rants?) for eight hours.  She dropped me off by the Century City mall, after the usual song-and-dance where people from car-based cultures like LA refuse to believe that I really mean it when I say I'm perfectly happy to be dropped a block or two away from my destination if (as here) it means it might help the driver to speed on her way a little more quickly.  I was very pleased with the day because the goal had been to have me at Century City at 4, and we managed to do pretty much everything I'd hoped to accomplish on the day while going just a very few minutes long on our schedule.

I met up with my client Jeff Gelb at the Century City Borders, and he was kind enough to then take me to the B&N in Westside Pavillion en route to dinner and a bookstore at the Borders and Whole Foods adjacent to one another in El Segundo, followed by an after-dinner visit to the Manhattan Beach B&N and then the Borders and B&N in Torrance.  Some deja vu on this; the Whole Foods in Tustin and El Segundo are like clones.  The Torrance stores were old hat, but all the others were new.  With six new Borders added, my count is now up to 197 and I'm nicely on target to get to my 200th by the end of the year, which is one of my goals.  The Borders in Torrance is a very very strong store, one of the first superstores in the South Bay and holding up well, and I was quite taken with the Borders in El Segundo as well.  Both meals at Whole Foods were yummy!  It's always nice to spend time with Jeff because we have similar interests, if not always similar tastes, in comics and movies and other things.  He dropped me off at the Redondo Beach stop on the light rail, and I had a long if uneventful ride to downtown on the green and blue light rail lines.  It may actually be somewhat shorter to take a rapid bus line into downtown, but depending in part on if you know the schedule for the bus, which I did not.  But that has fewer stops, and you don't go east to then double back west into downtown.

My plan for the next morning, if I woke up early, was to walk to Beverly Hills along Wilshire Blvd.,, around 10 miles, and I did wake up early and did set out along Wilshire, helped by the fact that my 10:30 had been moved to the next day.  Unfortunately, I got a call that my 11:30 couldn't do 11:30 any more, and could I come in earlier, so I had to give up on doing the full walk and take the bus part of the way.  But the part of the walk I was able to do, from downtown to Wilshire and Western, was a delight.  It turns out there are a series of Angels Walk self-guided tours in LA, and this stretch of Wilshire is among them.  So all along the way there are large canister signs on the sidewalk (excuse me, stanchions, which you can read here) that describe the history and architecture and infamy of some of the more important buildings along the way.  I found myself reading with great fascination about two gorgeous old department stores, one converted into use by a law school, and famous old residences and the Wilshire Blvd. Temple and the Wiltern Theatre and more.  The saddest of all is for the Ambassador Hotel, the once famous and glamorous hostelry where Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and which was torn down to make way for a school.  I'd read articles about this a year or two ago because preservation groups were trying very hard to save it, and I still cannot believe that a way couldn't have been found to preserve more of it than just an entrance pillar at the driveway, which it wouldn't surprise me if it gets whacked "accidentally" by a backhoe before the school is finished.  Well, if I'm ever back in LA I'll have to pay more attention to the Angels Walk locations.

There are 3 varieties of bus running along Wilshire, the regular #20, the Rapid #720, and the Rapid Express #920.  I've read the fancy buses have some ability to hold a green light or end a red light for just a few seconds so they can go along the way a little quicker, and I got on a 920 at Western that made only 2 stops going the 6 or 7 miles to Beverly Hills.  So I did my 11:30 at 10:00, was able to move my 12:30 to 11:30, and then had several hours before the True Blood premiere.  I had lunch at Bombay Palace, which I liked.  A good mulligitawny soup, and a tasty okra dish even if the okra itself was a bit on the tough side.  If my meetings had been on their original schedule I would have combined some walking and some cabs or buses to get to Hollywood for the premiere, but since I had an abundance of time I decided to walk the whole way, compensating in part for the abruptly abridged Wilshire walk.  Alas, this meant I was walking in the heat of the day with the sun beating down instead of doing it before the day had a chance to heat up totally.  But I walked up La Cienega to visit the Borders there and to pop in to the Beverly Center (not worth a ride up four flights of escalators just to get to the mall), then over on Beverly to the Grove and the Farmers Market.  I hadn't been to the Farmers Market since 1979 and was disappointed.  I did buy a scoop of chocolate malt ice cream that was good but not worth $4.  Up Fairfax past a stretch of Jewish and Kosher restaurants/stores (decent hamentashen at Canters), then over Melrose to Golden Apple Comics (a very good store for funny book and graphic novel fans) and then finally up to Hollywood Blvd., over to Musso & Franks for a drinks meeting, by which time I was kind of totally exhausted and spent, and then over to the True Blood premiere which I blogged about a few days ago and which you can read about here.   I thought about taking a cab back to downtown from the premiere but decided to take the red line subway which was kind of the whole idea of the trip; no matter how much money I make I think I'll always be a bus and train and foot guy so long as the body holds up.

Friday morning I woke up, packed, and hopped on the #720 bus from downtown to La Cienega to meet with my client Mayer Alan Brenner, and one of the very first authors I sold (Catastrophe's Spell to Sheila Gilbert at DAW).  Mayer is one of my earliest clients and has recently found his muse again, and has also allowed free download of his earlier books thru Creative Commons licensing, which you can check out here.  We chatted for a bit at La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills, then I walked a half block up for what had originally been my 10:30 on Thursday, then lunch with Randall Rosa, the producer who has an option on the Nightside books, (pretty nifty website Randall has, actually, and if you're looking for a nice french onion soup in the LA area click no further) then a quick meeting with Don Murphy, who has an option on James Robert Baker's FUEL-INJECTED DREAMS.  His office is beneath the sign of the giant Kermit, quite literally.  I relaxed on a shady bench in the lot for a few minutes, reading my newspaper, then took the Red Line out to North Hollywood, walked over to Dark Delicacies, hung out for a bit with Del Howison and Sue Howison, and then Lisa Morton came by and we hung out some more, and then Del took me to Bob Hope for my red eye back to NYC.

All in all it was quite a nice trip, in part because I finally did LA on my own terms and somewhat on my own power.  On my next visit to LA, if I can get to the Valley bookstores from Woodland Hills to Northridge to Santa Clarita and points in between, I will have pretty much visited every major bookstore from Mission Viejo in the Southeast to the far ends of the Northwest, but for now there's that one quadrant to get to.  I hate the red eye and kind of vegged out on Saturday.  I got horribly behind on newspapers and have been slowly catching up over the past week.  It's been nice to have a full week in the office for the first time since the week of  July 21.  

I'd still like to do one more tennis blog.  I haven't blogged much really about my Willamette Writers/Denvention trip.