Near our new house is an arthouse theater* that plays morbid stuff like the overrated Winter's Bone and sugar-free French bubblegum along the lines of Coco and Igor. For some reason, this theater has a sister theater in Northhampton playing equally unadventurous fare. The Cinemark is the only non-arthouse cinema accessible to us in the Pioneer Valley. I'll say this for it; it was a common punishment when I was a child to be made to sit in a far corner, silently and out of the way, and The Cinemark sits in the same way, like an abashed giant, behind The Hampshire Mall. It's almost difficult to find.
I had natural reservations about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The Brian O'Malley comic series never appealed to me at first glance--something about them seemed too big-eyed and pre-sexually dimorphic. Same goes for Michael Cera. But we really wanted to see a movie and were squeezed between the deadly Scyllia and Charbydis of The Expendables and The Kids Are All Right and right into Scott Pilgrim's seemingly weak arms.
We loved it! I can't think of any recent movie that better weds the play-sense of games and movies, or which evokes more honest interaction between the audience and the gimmick-packed toolbox accessible to modern filmmaking. Yet I'm not surprised by the bad box-office for this movie. The trailer is brain-meltingly generic. The movie itself is full of catchy, authentic-sounding garage rock and Nintendo Entertainment System references, both of which register strongly with my generation but which probably seem corny to an 18 year old. Edgar Wright, the director, seems genuinely to love these things-- the spatter of shiny coins against the ground, the swing of a flaming sword around a protagonist's head, the murky sound waves one wants to see pulse from a Marshall Stack. All of this equals Big Joy, which is anathema to the Neanderthal-browed Tarkovskian aesthetic dourness of your average teenager, and has been for decades. This movie is strictly for adults.
*In our first week in Amherst we went to see a revival print of To Catch A Thief. The audience was full of honor-roll kids and their parents. The projection was murky and off-center throughout. There was a recent ad in Craigslist for a professional projectionist at the theater. I hope they found one.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Sunday, August 22, 2010
The Iron Dream Monday, August 16, 2010
I also found this beauty at Grey Matter Books last week. Norman Spinrad's take on the Science Fiction book Hitler would have written. From headier days.
Grey Matter Books, lest you get the wrong impression, has phenomenal sections in used poetry, science, literature and philosophy, a great line-up of events, and a pretty decent record selection in the back. It just happens to have the only substantial science fiction collection in The Pioneer Valley, as well. Top marks.
Too Much Fun
The blog strips the teasing, private diary of its context and secures it as public. Believe me, I have no problem pumping out unsupportable opinions. In this respect I'm like a minor-league baseball mascot, blasting t-shirts with an air-gun over the beer-numb fingers of the crowd.
Yet I'm having too much fun in Amherst to notionally bronze its baby booties! Typical day--write some, read some, hop on the bike and do some errand, come home and play or learn some new game*, all the while taking time to make slightly more elaborate meals than normal.
Reading list: a Robert Sheckley omnibus, Michael Schmidt's clumsy but informative The Lives of the Poets (with The Penguin Book of English Verse at close hand), lots of Emily Dickinson.
*Cribbage and two-handed Euchre have re-entered my repertoire, and Ish and I have been circling around the great Amherst gamer's collective at Worlds Apart Games. Of special interest is the intimidatingly rule-heavy but open-ended Gurps role-playing system.
Going Mobile Friday, August 6, 2010
Lift, yoke, spend: the end result being, I live in Amherst, Massachusetts, now, with most of my stuff. It's a state I have yet to spell correctly on the first try (I always want to squeeze a fifth "s" in there), I am almost totally indifferent to the baseball playing on televisions in this city's many collegiate-style bars, and distances are to be judged by long, dull real estate patches of no public interest at all (I used to say we lived near Emily Dickinson's house until I walked there--now I say that Emily Dickinson's house is the nearest thing of interest to us). All that being said, I feel as if I were renting a patch of paradise. Just past the sliding doors of our kitchen are not just trees but a whole, dense woods from which exotic animals sometimes stumble, brace themselves, and retreat. The birds here have strange calls and sound to my dead, urban ears like amusement devices.
I just bought a bike to get around. It's a small bike, designed to fold in half and then in half again, and it fits well in the space between the bookshelf and the front door. Balancing myself on the thing is like balancing a watermelon on top of a moving pineapple, but when it gets going it's a pure joy. I bought a black helmet embossed with a bright green four-leaf clover. I think it suits me. I'm inclined to wear it on my head at all times, even at dinner. The bike will assist me in getting to the area's many record shops and bookstores, where I will attempt not to spend my dwindling resources. About which, more later.
Leaving New York Sunday, July 18, 2010
My last month in New York has been so busy I've barely taken time to register the fact that I'm abandoning it. I moved here when I was thirty and now I'm moving out seven years later. New York is not the place to find you've transformed from reliably young to borderline middle-aged. At least, not earning what I earn. I suspect it's no more fun for those higher up the service industry. The flight away to quiet, green, smug Massachusetts may have a trace of panic in it. Still, I'm trying to take in this dying city one last time. I feel like I'm failing. I walked from a midtown party up to the Lexington Avenue stop on the N Train, and the buildings were all as anonymous as ever, awesome in their height but newly absurd.
READERCON IMPRESSIONS PART 2 Tuesday, July 13, 2010
We started at 4 pm Friday with an almost disappointingly literate lecture on "The Unknowable Character" led by The Washington Post's Michael Dirda--the only mainstream reviewer I can think of who commonly reviews Science Fiction. The conversation--ostensibly geared toward the problems of writing alienness--veered from Beckett to James Purdy to Dostoyevsky without ever getting as bug-eyed and squishy as I would have liked. The "Authoratativeness in Fiction" panel had the same problem, so I snuck out and joined a standing-room-only lecture on microbes--titled "Microbes!"-- by a practiced lecturer on the subject. There we found out about the very cool notion of bacterially-produced electricity.
Still hot and tired from our bus ride, we escaped the panel for an hour to sit in the hotel's sauna and take a dip in the pool. As I floated face-up in the cool water a perfect sychronicity clicked into place: where I wanted to be and where I happened to be were the same, for maybe the fifteenth or twentieth time in my life.
After the swim there was a fun panel featuring college drop outs--Professor Chip Delany included-- which, once again, did not feature much in the way of Science Fiction, but which did feature a lot of accountable anger, amusingly recalled.
The highlight of that night's party was Barry Malzberg's disquisition on failure, given to commemorate that year's Corwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. Maltzberg is on in years, but above his somewhat crooked body his face popped with sour life as he recounted all the ways in which writers might go forgotten, necessitating the slim consolation of posthumous rediscovery.
Readercon Impressions Part 1 Monday, July 12, 2010
After a lot of bus riding and walking around the Pioneer Valley cities of Northampton and Amherst--like the rest of the Northeast, they were experiencing record heat-- we finally found a place to live, in a townhouse not far from the UMass campus. We celebrated by canceling all of other showings and having drinks with the local poets. The next day, we took an early bus and went to the Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts, site of the 21st Annual Readercon.
Burlington itself is a weird simulacra of a city about 7 miles to the north west of Boston, whose buildings encrust, in regular formations common both to bivalvic sea life and retail architecture, the intersection of Interstate 95 and State Road 3. It is a city built to encourage sales without the heady distractions of public life. The only thing distinguishing the Marriott from the nearby Burlington Mall was its bearding of flowering bushes and the swimming pool in back.
Inside was a different matter. By the time we walked into the front lobby at three in the afternoon on Friday, hot and tired from our apartment search, the convention had already been going for a good 24 hours. It was our first big science fiction convention. The front lobby was clogged with men and women, sporting physiques somewhat outlying those held by our Renaissance-era painter friends as falling within the ideal, wrapped to the last lumpen torso in black T-Shirts, either tight-fitting or loose-fitting but never in-between, proclaiming allegiance to "Clarion 2009" or sporting some cloud-borne cryptozoological monstrosity.* The Burlington Marriott is foremost a business hotel, and the hotel's ordinary clientèle, distinguishable by their minority presence as well as by their attractively-fitted clothing and ruddy skin tone, slipped among the Readercon bodies like declawed lions among a thousand confident gazelles.
Another first impression: outsider opinion holds that these conventions are attended exclusively by men, and while that may once have been true, the situation has changed. Unlike your typical corporate boardroom or university creative writing poetry department, the world of science fiction and fantasy has in the last twenty years seen an influx of feminine talent, both lucrative and inspiring. These are not necessarily the spiritual daughters of Russ and Atwood and LeGuin, who were first-rate writers because they had to be, but hard-headed dealers in the business of genre, ready to give a verbal power-point presentation on why her vampire-loves-mermaid steampunk novel is more thrilling than the other three on the market. These earners outnumbered this generation's first-raters like Nalo Hopkinson and Kelly Link, but they were in the right place, in the marketplace, having fun as both fans and untortured practitioners, among their peers. Readercon felt like a solidly co-ed affair.
