Tag: books

Netflixed The Friends of Eddie Coyle

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New Criterion Collection release of the cult classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (IMDb) / Wikipedia / [Netflix]


“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (Peter Yates)

The gritty 1974 cult classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, directed by the criminally underrated Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away), is now available for the first time ever on DVD, in a Criterion special edition. In it, classic Hollywood tough guy Robert Mitchum plays the titular small-time Boston gunrunner, nicknamed Fingers, who’s caught between remaining loyal to his criminal cohorts and turning them in to avoid jail time, and Mitchum does it with a poignant, effortless precision that makes the film’s brutal twists all the more effective. With its evocative sense of time and place, and expert pacing, Eddie Coyle is a brilliant, quintessential work of seventies American cinema.

Kent Jones writes, in part:

Offhanded fatalism is embedded in every word of every exchange, each of which alternates between hide-and-seek games and verbal tugs-of-war. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an extremely faithful adaptation (in structure, spirit, and flavor) of the first published novel by the Brockton, Massachusetts–born Higgins, whose career as a United States prosecutor and then big-time criminal defense lawyer (his clients included Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy) coincided with his ascendancy as a novelist, and whose dialogue is one of the glories of American literature. “I’m not doing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,” Higgins once said. “The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling you the story, they’re going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.” What is remarkable about the film is the extreme degree to which Yates and the producer and writer, Paul Monash, adhere to Higgins’s aesthetic, banking on the contention that if you render the action among the characters as faithfully as possible, their entire moral universe will be revealed.

And so it is. “Look, one of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry,” says Robert Mitchum’s Eddie to Steven Keats’s inappropriately relaxed arms salesman, Jackie Brown (guess who’s a fan of this movie), in what might be the film’s most emblematic bit of table talk. “All you got to know is that I told the man he can depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is gonna have a big fat problem. Another thing I’ve learned: if anybody’s gonna have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.” As in every good dialogue-driven film, talk in The Friends of Eddie Coyle equals action. In this case, maneuvering for leverage and self-preservation.

Nothing could be further from Higgins’s full-immersion approach to fiction than a collection of prima donna thespians vying for attention; thankfully, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a true ensemble piece if ever there was one. It’s amazing that a star of Robert Mitchum’s caliber even considered this movie (he was originally offered the role of the bartender); that he integrated himself so fully into the ensemble and the working-class Boston atmosphere is some kind of miracle. Mitchum is on-screen for roughly half of the movie, and never for a moment does he or the filmmakers play the movie star card—no special isolated “moments,” no hammy overplaying or sneaky underplaying. Golden-age Hollywood’s most notorious bad boy arrived in Boston ready for action on every front, as amply chronicled by Grover Lewis in his Rolling Stone profile “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” Apart from the usual shenanigans (think blondes and booze), Mitchum went right to work, getting an “Eddie Coyle haircut” (which might have been executed with a lawn trimmer) and allegedly hanging out with the notorious Whitey Bulger, the prototype for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, and his Winter Hill Gang. Higgins was worried, Mitchum was unfazed. “It’s a two-way street,” he told Lewis, “because the guys Higgins means are associating with a known criminal in talking to me.” Apart from a few slippages here and there, Mitchum mastered the exceptionally difficult Boston accent. More importantly, he found the right loping rhythm, the right level of spiritual exhaustion, the right amount of cloaked malevolence. If Mitchum betrays anything of himself as Eddie, it’s his sense of poetry, which, for roughly three-fourths of his career as an actor, seems to have manifested itself off- and not on-screen. But when he rose to the occasion, he was one of the best actors in movies. Thinks like a poet, acts like a jazz musician, hitting on the perfect melancholy chord progression from his initial appearance and playing quietly dolorous variations right to the end.

[Click to continue reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle:They Were Expendable – From the Current]

Sounds intriguing, consider it added to the queue, maybe the book too…


“The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (John MacRae Books)” (George V. Higgins)

Bob on Obama

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“Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (Barack Obama)

Bob liked Barack Obama’s book enough to support him in 2008.

Bill Flanagan: In that song Chicago After Dark were you thinking about the new President?

Bob Dylan: Not really. It’s more about State Street and the wind off Lake Michigan and how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them. I was trying to go with some old time feeling that I had.

BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?

BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.

BF: Audacity of Hope?

BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

BF: In what way?

BD: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise – so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.

BF: And he was thrown out of the garden.

BD: Not exactly. His mom married some other guy named Lolo and then took Barack to Indonesia to live. Barack went to both a Muslim school and a Catholic school. His mom used to get up at 4:00 in the morning and teach him book lessons three hours before he even went to school. And then she would go to work. That tells you the type of woman she was. That’s just in the beginning of the story.

BF: What else did you find compelling about him?

BD: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

[Click to continue reading Bob Dylan on Barack Obama, Ulysses Grant and American Civil War ghosts ]

One of these days I’ll read the President’s books.

Reading Around on March 30th

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Some additional reading March 30th from 14:16 to 19:48:

  • jimmy's cocktail hour: Whiskey for the People. – "Pikesville Rye is widely distributed, and is usually available for around $11.99. Some parts of the country get it for $9.99. Let's call it $12. This is good rye at a bargain price. If you have a bottle of bitters on hand, you're all set. "
  • Cocktail Hacker » Blog Archive » MxMo XXXVI: Recession Gin and Tonic – So how hard is this cocktail going to hit your wallet? It’s not going to hit it hard at all. It’s going to be like a kitten falling on a pile of pillows.

    Burnett’s Gin (1.75 L) $15.99 -> 2 oz $0.54
    Realime (15 oz) $3.09 -> 1 tsp $0.04
    C-Dry Tonic (6×12 oz) $2.99 -> 6 oz $0.25
    Total Cost Per Drink $0.83
    Eighty three cents. Try to wrap your head around that number. That’s cheaper than a soft drink nearly anywhere. It’s cheaper than a crappy cup of coffee from the vending machine in my office.

  • The Cocktail Chronicles » MxMo Hard Times: Drink Like a King(sley) – Need to read this book!
    "Vital requirement: prepare pre- and post-dinner drinks in some undiscoverable pantry or broom-cupboard well away from the main scene. This will not only screen your niggardliness; it will also make the fetching of each successive round look like a slight burden, and will cast an unfavorable limelight on any individual determined to wrest additional drinks out of you. Sit in a specially deep easy-chair, and practise getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan, though beware of overdoing this."
  • Twitter Blog: Replies Are Now Mentions – Seems like this should pick up on re-tweets too (RT @swanksalot for instance). Good tweak to the API.
  • The Art of Sampling | TheFrontloader.com – "Sometime late last year, I was looking through the new releases when I came across a sincere tragedy. Hilary Duff was back, and THIS time, it was personal… “Personal Jesus”-personal. It seemed that, for her “Best Of” album, she needed a new song and thus decided to sample Depeche Mode’s 1989 hit “Personal Jesus” for her single, “Reach Out.”

    At first I couldn’t believe it because I consider Depeche Mode music sacred ground, but then I found a link to the music video and decided to see if it was true. For those of you that have been lucky enough to miss this, consider yourself very unlucky right now"

  • The Washington Monthly -IF IT'S SUNDAY, IT'S JOHN MCCAIN – John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press – just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows – 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse.

Org Porn

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“Everything (almost) In Its Place: Control Chaos, Conquer Clutter, and Get Organized the Buttoned Up Way” (Alicia Rockmore, Sarah Welch)

Amusing.

Negative self-image. Fantasy-induced over-spending. Marital tension. A new kind of airbrushed fantasy-land is wreaking havoc on our homes and our psyches: org porn. “Org porn is that glossy, airbrushed fantasy world where everything is pristine, serene and perfectly in order, sort of Playboy, but with chore charts and name-plated cubbyholes,” said Sarah Welch. “It’s everywhere you look these days: in magazines, coffee table books, advertisements, and TV shows. And when consumed in excess, it can lead to feelings of inadequacy, binge spending on organizational products, and even marital discord.” The authors [ Alicia Rockmore and Sarah Welch] have interviewed hundreds of women on the topic of organization and an astounding 80% of them feel they fall well short of the mark when it comes to getting organized.

“Don’t get us wrong, gazing at beautiful images of meticulously organized rooms, perfectly displayed collections, color-coordinated closets, flawless family schedules, pristine kitchens, tidy mud rooms, and picture-perfect work spaces can be titillating — even meditative. There’s a reason we call it ‘org porn,'” said Alicia Rockmore. “But when they become the primary yardstick by which you measure your own general state of organization is when it becomes unhealthy. An airbrushed land of perfect organization cannot be sustained in this messy, unpredictable world called real life.”

Chasing perfection fuels something the authors call “organizational inertia,” a type of paralysis that makes it virtually impossible to get started. Nearly every woman surveyed for Everything (Almost) In Its Place agreed that the most difficult part of getting organized was knowing where to start. If perfection is the objective, that paralysis makes sense. Keeping your house, work and schedule magazine-ready requires a superhuman effort to achieve and constant, superhuman vigilance to maintain. The goal of getting organized isn’t necessarily to have everything picture-perfect, but rather to eliminate inefficiency, so that you have more time to do what you actually want to do.

[From Are Women Addicted To Org Porn? ]

Anyone who has visited my home or office knows that I am not addicted to organization, unless absence of organization is sign of addiction too. Clutter is Us could be our motto. Luckily, finding bits of information is relatively easy when the information has been digitized, so life has gotten better in that regard. Digital music has been a boon as well, actually. Finding the right album was more difficult when I had to flip through stacks of vinyl. Now if I could only figure out how to digitize my refrigerator…

Flat N All That Boyee

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“Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America” (Thomas L. Friedman)

Matt Taibbi is not going to get invited to Tom Friedman’s 12,000 square foot mega-mansion anytime soon after publishing such a fun evisceration of Friedman’s “green” book, Hot Flat and Crowded. Especially when Mr. Taibbi’s review veers on tangents like:

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.” First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

Wisconsin countryside

before even tackling the ridiculousness that is Tom Friedman’s latest tome:

Many people have rightly seen this new greenish pseudo-progressive tract as an ideological departure from Friedman’s previous works, which were all virtually identical exercises in bald greed-worship and capitalist tent-pitching. Approach-and-rhetoric wise, however, it’s the same old Friedman, a tireless social scientist whose research methods mainly include lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes.

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot, Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” And off he goes. You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you don’t notice that tri-planes don’t have headlights.And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks. And you give up. There’s so much shit flying around the book’s atmosphere that you don’t notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.

[From Flat N All That]

If you need a laugh today, or you are amused by graphs charting the size of Valerie Bertinelli’s ass, read the whole article.

The Thin Man turns 75

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I’ve actually never read any of the Thin Man books, but I’ve seen all of the film adaptions [Netflix], and enjoyed their archness. I’ll have to pick up a copy…

“The Thin Man,” Dashiell Hammett’s fifth and final novel, turns 75 this month.

Written in the wake of the same author’s hard-boiled 1930 private-detective classic, “The Maltese Falcon” and his bleak 1931 thriller of civic corruption, “The Glass Key,” the amusing and flippant-seeming “The Thin Man” (in which almost all violence occurs offstage) took readers by surprise in 1934. Reviewers’ judgments at the time were mixed: The New York Herald Tribune thought it “a new hard-boiled opus worthy to stand beside the best of his other works,” but the New Republic found it “a less excitingly fresh performance.”

The author himself made no great claims for his creation. “Nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters,” he said of the book’s married protagonists, Nick and Nora Charles; and in 1957, four years before his death, he would claim that “‘The Thin Man’ always bored me.”

Yet Hammett — often as hedonistic in life as the heavy drinkers in his stories — was sober and industrious while writing the novel during his tenancy in an unimpressive New York hotel managed by his friend and fellow author Nathanael West; and, one way or another, the book and its characters would earn Dashiell Hammett (according to biographer Richard Layman) close to a million dollars

[Click to continue reading His Camera-Ready Comedy – WSJ.com]

[non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

Don’t recall this line from the movie: perhaps it was altered, or judged too cynical for Hollywood:

Nick Charles is an expert on sorting out falsehoods and those who tell them. “The chief thing,” he advises a police lieutenant regarding one habitual fantasizer, “is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people — even women — get discouraged after you’ve caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her.”


The Thin Man box set

New Winnie-the-Pooh Book Due in October

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“Winnie the Pooh 80th Anniversary Edition” (A.A. Milne)

Really?

The troubled book industry, in need of titles that will pull readers into the stores, will get a much-needed jolt this fall when the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” and “The House at Pooh Corner” is published Oct. 5 under the title “Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.”

Mr. Milne died in 1956. The author of the new book is David Benedictus, who produced two successful audiobooks based on Mr. Milne’s famous children’s titles. Mr. Benedictus, who lives in London, said that after an earlier offer to write a sequel was rebuffed, he heard back from the Milne estate about 2½ years ago. “People will be highly suspicious, but I hope they’ll think I didn’t do a bad job,” said Mr. Benedictus.

The work, illustrated by Mark Burgess, is being published in the U.S. by Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Pearson PLC’s Penguin Young Readers Group (USA). Don Weisberg, president of Penguin Young Readers Group, said he expects the title to be a “huge seller for a long, long time.” The initial print run will be in excess of 100,000.

[From New Winnie-the-Pooh Book Due in October – WSJ.com]

[non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

I have a wait-and-see attitude, the original books were oft read in my childhood. Seems hard to imagine a new book would be as charming, but I don’t have a child of my own to test it upon.

Toujours Tingo

swanksalot2 Comments


“Toujours Tingo” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)

Oooh, sounds fun. Nothing like working in bizarre phrases into conversation

Toujours Tingo, a book by Adam Jacot de Boinod, lists weird words and bizarre phrases from around the world. The “tingo” of its title is an Easter Island word, meaning to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left.

some faves:

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper – literally, “an enraged sheep”.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone’s parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf

Les avoir a zero: French for “to have one’s testicles down to zero”, or be frightened.

Du kannst mir gern den buckel runterrutschen und mit der zunge bremsen: Austrian for “go to hell” – literally “You can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake”.

[Continue reading Toujours Tingo: Weird words and bizarre phrases – Telegraph]

Perfect for the language maven on your Xmas list…

Great Influenza

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The Great Influenza

I haven’t quite finished John Barry’s history of the deadly flu epidemic of 1918, but it is a fascinating book.
Karen Brudney, M.D. writes:

The connection among public health, epidemic disease, and politics can be seen throughout history, from the responses to the Black Death in Italian cities in 1348 to the response — or lack thereof — to the resurgence of tuberculosis on the part of the New York City Department of Health in the 1980s. John M. Barry spells out this connection in fascinating detail in The Great Influenza. In his meticulous description of the dire consequences that resulted when short-term political expediency trumped the health of the public during the 1918 influenza pandemic, Barry reminds his readers that the government response to an epidemic is all too often colored by the politics of the moment. Barry is neither a scientist nor a professional historian, and some of the details he gives on virology and immunology are clearly targeted at a nonmedical audience, but physicians and scientists will find this book engrossing nonetheless. The influenza pandemic of 1918, the worst pandemic in history, killed more people than died in World War I and more than the tens of millions who have died, to date, in the AIDS pandemic.

Barry focuses only on what was occurring in the United States at the time, and he tries to place this unprecedented human disaster both against the background of American history and within the context of the history of medicine. He is right to try to acquaint the reader with the state of American medicine at the turn of the last century, focusing on the dismal status of medical education and laboratory research, particularly as compared with that in Europe at the same time. Much of his discussion centers on “great men” (and an occasional great woman), however, and the picture given of their lives and professional careers is superficial and occasionally repetitious, and it distracts from the main events. His point, presumably, is to convey the futility of all the efforts of these brilliant minds, and he begins and ends the book with anecdotes about Paul Lewis, a scientist who had helped to prove that poliomyelitis is caused by a virus and then developed a highly effective simian vaccine. Lewis is the symbol of the best and the brightest of the scientific establishment, and we follow him as he weaves in and out of the story. He, like all scientists of his time, failed to grasp the fact that influenza was caused by a virus, believing it to be caused by Pfeiffer’s bacillus, and he was therefore unable to develop a successful vaccine or to halt the devastation. The book becomes riveting once Barry begins to describe the origins and early weeks of the epidemic.

The fact that it was wartime and that hundreds of thousands of men were being called up, placed in overcrowded camps, and packed like sardines into ships to be delivered as efficiently as possible to Europe enabled influenza to spread rapidly among recruits. From the military camps, the virus spread into the civilian population in the United States and from the United States to France. Barry describes the first catastrophe at Camp Devens, in Massachusetts, in the late summer of 1918, where thousands of previously healthy men in their prime suddenly became critically ill, overwhelming the inadequate camp hospital, infecting the medical staff, and dying by the hundreds, apparently with acute respiratory distress syndrome. The smartest and most hardworking scientists, physicians, and nurses, both military and civilian, were stunned by the rapidity of the disease progression and the inexplicable death toll among the youngest and strongest. (Figure) Barry provides a fascinating picture of the response of the government — both federal and local. The former was sluggish at best and secretive and dishonest at worst, desperate to keep the war effort going and the public calm and to minimize the severity of the disease. In one of the more gripping chapters, Barry focuses on Philadelphia and tells us of the backwardness of its social infrastructure, the lack of a functioning health department, and the power of the local political machine.

Dr. Wilmer Krusen, a political appointee who was the director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Charities, deliberately ignored warnings against allowing a Liberty Loan parade to proceed, even though influenza had devastated the local Navy Yard and begun to spread into the civilian population. Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled. Within 10 days the epidemic exploded from a few hundred civilian cases to hundreds of thousands and from a daily rate of one or two deaths to hundreds. The horror is most vivid in the dilemma surrounding the disposal of bodies. The city morgue had hundreds of bodies stacked up, which produced an unbearable stench, and undertakers rapidly ran out of coffins. Hundreds of bodies lay in homes exactly where they had been at the time of death; burial quickly became impossible, since there were not enough people to dig graves. Whether anything might have been done differently, and if it had, whether this would have made a difference, are questions that Barry leaves unanswered. His tone is often irritatingly and unnecessarily sensationalist. But his indictment of the public authorities for their dishonesty and deliberate minimization of the damage and dangers is particularly chilling in today’s climate of bioterrorism, in the midst of a war whose damages and dangers have been similarly minimized. Barry makes it all too easy to imagine a similarly devastating epidemic with a similarly inadequate response. I highly recommend this book to all.

Pippen gets Famous

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Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan and my cat1, featured in an LA Times blog…

There are legions of people who love books, and who love cats, and have a habit of photographing them together. You may like books and not like cats; I know it’s possible. But this post, my friends, is not for you. This post is for people who think that Pippen, above, is awfully cute when confronting the “Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

[From Books and cats: a love affair in photos | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times]

Of course, Pippen prefers the taste of rabbit to corn…

Footnotes:
  1. when he was but a kitten [↩]

Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One

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Picked up a copy of Deke McClelland’s new book for Adobe Photoshop CS4. Came with 4 hours worth of lynda.com instructional video, and plenty of tips and techniques. I usually find at least a dozen good new things in these sort of books, and relearn a bunch of things I used to know. Too bad there isn’t an upgrade price for computer manuals too.
From the Amazon site – top ten new features, even though some aren’t really that new:

10) Spring-loaded tools. Temporarily select a tool by pressing and holding its shortcut key. For example, when retouching an image with the healing brush: Press and hold Y to temporarily get the history brush, erase part of your modification, and then release Y to return to the healing brush.

9) The Adjustments palette. Nondestructive adjustment layers (which are independent layers of editable color adjustment) are now handled in a palette. Some folks will love the convenience, others will lament the many changes that were required to accommodate this feature. Mostly, though, the palette aggregates stuff that’s been there for ages. One new item, Vibrance, enhances color intensity without exaggerating noise.

8) The Masks palette. CS4’s other new palette is largely another aggregator, providing convenient access to old features. Three new items: The wonderful Color Range command can now directly generate masks. Color Range can see base colors based on proximity. And you can blur edges parametrically (meaning non-permanently, by the numbers).

7) The enhanced Bridge 3.0. The Bridge is CS4’s asset manager, permitting you to preview and organize your images. Auto-updating workspaces, a review mode complete with image carousel, full-screen preview, folder-independent image collections, and search-based smart collections are just a few improvements. Oh, and you can assemble multipage PDF contact sheets from the Output panel.

6) Improved toning tools. Paint with the dodge tool to lighten an image; paint with the burn tool to darken. Only thing, the tools used to suck. Now they’re so good, I actually use them on a regular basis. They’re still destructive (meaning they permanently change pixels), but in a good way!

5) Camera Raw 5. Essentially a logically organized and altogether independent color adjustment application, Camera Raw continues to be that top-secret tool that makes every version of Photoshop worth buying. This time, it offers the equivalent of nondestructive and highly customizable dodge and burn. Which you can apply as brushstrokes or gradients. Plus you can add vignettes inside crop boundaries. It’s like a free copy of Lightroom bundled inside every version of Photoshop. Which given that Lightroom costs more than a Photoshop upgrade, and this is just feature 5 of 10, is fairly significant.

4) Target adjustment tool. Associated with three color adjustments—Hue/Saturation, Black & White, and Curves—the target adjustment tool lets you selectively modify colors and luminance levels by dragging in an image. For example, drag on a model’s lips to boost their saturation. No need to isolate a hue range. Just drag. Honestly, if you aren’t loving this tool within a week, check to make sure you have a pulse.

3) The tabbed-window interface. This feature has already proved controversial, with a few noisy Macintosh users in particular voicing disapproval. But speaking as a cross-platform guy with a decidedly Mac bias, it’s a net-sum gain. You now have the option of docking every image in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Plus, you can drag-and-drop a layer onto a tab to move that layer from one image to another. The tabbed window interface is a masterpiece of design and a thing of beauty.

2) Content-aware scaling. Part of Adobe’s advance compositing suite, the Content Aware Scale command lets you stretch or squish low-contrast “background” elements independently of high-contrast “foreground” ones. Which means you can bring people together, turn horizontal images into vertical ones, and otherwise transform photographs intelligently. My guess: five years from now we’ll all be mocking this feature for what it got wrong. (The degree to which it can mess up certain images is fantastic!) But in the moment, you’re going to be singing its praises. This is Photoshop’s first truly magical feature since the magic wand. And that was 18 years ago, babies. (Okay, the healing brush was also magical. And that was, what, seven years ago? So we’re talking three magical features in two decades. Got to admit, magic is rare.)

1) OpenGL navigation. Forget all that other stuff. Seriously, content-aware scaling? As if. So far as I’m concerned, Photoshop CS4 offers one and only one new feature: OpenGL navigation. Assuming you have a video card that supports OpenGL (most do), then here’s what you get: Slow continuous zooms. Rotate the view. Get the hand tool, toss the image, and watch it sail across the screen. Hold down H and click and hold for bird’s eye. And by God if every zoom level isn’t a thing of bicubically rendered beauty. (No idea what I’m talking about? Trust me, huge.) OpenGL navigation is so good it makes me hate CS3. Some nights, OpenGL navigation and I open a bottle of wine and just talk about how lucky we are just to have met each other. It’s that good.

Ten Thousand Hours

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Outliers: The Story of Success” (Malcolm Gladwell)

I’ve already ordered Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers1 just on the strength of a few excerpts I’ve stumbled upon. His New Yorker magazine style of writing is easily consumed2, and his ideas are usually interesting, if not always perfectly formed. His theories are what they are, but truth be told, I really just like his anecdotes. Speaking of the Beatles, I did not know this factoid about their Hamburg days…

Is this a general rule of success? If you scratch below the surface of every great achiever, do you always find the equivalent of the Michigan Computer Centre or the hockey all-star team – some sort of special opportunity for practice? Let’s test the idea with two examples: the Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands ever, and Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men.

The Beatles – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – came to the US in February 1964, starting the so-called “British Invasion” of the American music scene. The interesting thing is how long they had already been playing together. Lennon and McCartney began in 1957. (Incidentally, the time that elapsed between their founding and their greatest artistic achievements – arguably Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album – is 10 years.) In 1960, while they were still a struggling school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.

“Hamburg in those days did not have rock’n’roll music clubs. It had strip clubs,” says Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles’ biography, Shout! “There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light district, they would call it nonstop striptease.

“Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool,” Norman continues. “It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet a Liverpool entrepreneur in Soho, who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That’s how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno, but with other club owners as well. They kept going back, because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.”

And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. (It didn’t.) Or that the acoustics were fantastic. (They weren’t.) Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. (They were anything but.) It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play. Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra: “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman says. “They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock’n’roll, a bit of jazz, too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

[From Extract from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius? | Books | The Guardian ]

The excerpt goes on, click if you want to read more. Or just buy the book!

Footnotes:
  1. Amazon sent me an email today that the book was shipped from their warehouse – I should get it by Tuesday [↩]
  2. I tried to avoid using the phrase, breezy, but it does fit [↩]

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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“Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture Masters of Photography)” (Aperture)

Was lucky enough to sneak over to the Art Institute of Chicago this week, and explore the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit. Wow. My art-speak muscles have atrophied from inactivity1, so I’m not going to bore you with faux critical analysis, suffice it to say, I was blown away, and want to explore the exhibit again before it leaves, January 4th, 2009. I was not familiar with his work, besides perhaps one image that became famous recently2 when uploaded to Flickr. Amazing will suffice as an adjective for Mr. Cartier-Bresson.

The exhibit also mixes in drawings3 from contemporaries, sometimes uncannily similar, sometimes related in other fashion – such as a photo of Henri Matisse in his studio alongside a Matisse sketch.

From the AIC:

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Art Institute will present, for the first time, a comparison of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the modern drawings, etchings, and paintings of his contemporaries—works that would otherwise be in storage in preparation for their installation in the Modern Wing.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the legendary photojournalist whose work was characterized by the term “the decisive moment,” began his career as a painter influenced by the Surrealist poets who were a mainstay of Parisian café culture in the 1920s. Although his subsequent work in photography was concerned primarily with time and timing, it also reveals an appreciation for the irrational and subconscious gleaned from the work of writers and poets of this time.

Pulling from the Art Institute’s Julian Levy Collection—the legendary gallery director who assembled the first exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs in the United States—this exhibition provides a rare glimpse into the early stages of Cartier-Bresson’s career. Work by his painting instructor André Lhote parallels Cartier-Bresson’s early photographs, as does that of Salvador Dalí. Also included will be work by Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso that relates to photographs by Brassaï, André Kertész, and other photographers active in Paris between the World Wars.

When I got home, I ordered this book from Amazon

Henri Cartier-Bresson reveals–as only a few great artists have done consistently–the richness, the sensibilities, and the varieties of the human experience in the twentieth century. This volume of Aperture’s Masters of Photography series confirms the genius of the photographer whose pictures with the new, smaller hand-held cameras and faster films defined the idea of “the decisive moment” in photography.

Cartier-Bresson’s imagery is intimate, but it is also utterly respectful of his subjects. In his wide travels throughout the world, he has captured universal meanings through the glimpses into the lives of individuals in scores of countries. Each photograph is in itself a masterpiece of dramatic form; taken together, Cartier-Bresson’s works constitute a personal history of epic scope.

Henri Cartier-Bresson presents forty-two of the artist’s photographs, each recognized a a masterpiece of the medium. In addition, Cartier-Bresson offers a brief statement of his own artistic ethos, his striving for the spontaneity through intuition that imbues his work.

Forty-two 5″X7″ quality reproductions, well worth the $10 price tag. If you have the slightest interest in photography or art history, you should swing by the Art Institute, or at least pick up a copy of this book.

Footnotes:
  1. University of Texas was a long, long time ago [↩]
  2. A wiseacre uploaded this photo to a Flickr group called “deleteMe”, a group that invites photography critique. Some of the more dismissive comments seem to have been deleted, but plenty still remain, criticizing his lack of focus, weird depth of field, should have been in stronger focus, and so on. Flickr is a great site, but rewards a certain type of photo over all others. Color photos of beaches are fine, but are they really art? Over-saturated postcard style images usually get viewed much, much more than photos containing less technical polish. [↩]
  3. and paintings? The trouble with spending a couple hours browsing the Art Institute is that there is a certain amount of blur [↩]

FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

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“FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game” (Bethlehem Shoals, Dr. Lawyer IndianChief, Silverbird 5000, Brown Recluse Esq.)

Received my copy today. Looks like a lot of fun. Bloggers making good – the tome was written by Bethlehem Shoals (Author), Dr. Lawyer IndianChief (Author), Silverbird 5000 (Author), Brown Recluse Esq. (Author), Big Baby Belafonte (Illustrator). Excerpts are available if you want to dip your toe in FreeDarko waters. I jumped right in on the strength of their brand.

Mellos Nuts

The indispensible, amazingly illustrated companion to today’s NBA—a roundball Rosetta Stone that hilariously decodes the trends and tendencies of pro basketball.

The NBA of the moment is a league of hugely charismatic celebrities, crackling aesthetic intrigue, sociopolitical undercurrents, and raw humanity: every Kobe Bryant pump-fake or LeBron James dunk holds within it a Shaq-size load of meaning. The Macro-Phenomenal NBA Almanac is a one-of-a-kind guide to this tumultuous and exciting league. In a series of brilliantly illustrated chapters—from Master Builders like Tim Duncan to Destiny’s Kids like Amare Stoudemire to Lost Souls like Lamar Odom—the almanac breaks down the styles of the NBA’s most colorful characters, showing what each one reveals through his play and conduct, both on the court and off. Filled with some of the smartest, funniest sportswriting known to fankind, this book will cast an entirely new light on one of our favorite games.

Basketball Jones

From the book site:

The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac functions simultaneously as the ultimate basketball book for the ultimate NBA fan as well as the ideal sports book for the person with no interest in sports. This book will satiate the passionate sports fan’s desire to see athleticism legitimized as a cultural element extending beyond mere cro-magnon brawn.

Within the pages of this tome, NBA hoopery collides with Japanese noise-rock, municipal politics, experimental zoology, Belgian surrealism, and behavioral economics like never before. The mystical deities of this hallowed league of professional basketball are finally given the treatment they deserved, as they are scrutinized not as men, but as embodiments of our own core cultural values and insecurities.

Whereas past sports-literary endeavors have attempted to paint sports as a metaphor for life or life as a metaphor for sport, we depict the National Basketball Association as a universe unlike any that one would encounter in daily existence. The NBA is a sphere in which Indiana farmboys, housing project messiahs, African tribesmen, and escapees from war-torn Eastern Bloc countries, coalesce by the nature of their superhuman physicality. Free Darko was born to make sense of it all.

Awesome I say, awesome indeed.
One other point: the book is well designed, slick, with heavy paper stock, and brightly colored illustrations. Not a tri-fold manifesto published at night at a local copy shop, but a book that feels like it is something.

Year of Living Biblically

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“The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible” (A. J. Jacobs)

I had forgotten that I had pre-ordered this book a while ago, but it arrived via UPS today

The Year of Living Biblically is about my quest to live the ultimate biblical life. To follow every single rule in the Bible – as literally as possible. I obey the famous ones:
•The Ten Commandments
•Love thy neighbor
•Be fruitful and multiply

But also, the hundreds of oft-ignored ones.

•Do not wear clothes of mixed fibers.
•Do not shave your beard
•Stone adulterers
Why? Well, I grew up in a very secular home (I’m officially Jewish but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant). I’d always assumed religion would just wither away and we’d live in a neo-Enlightenment world. I was, of course, spectacularly wrong. So was I missing something essential to being a human? Or was half the world deluded?

I decided to dive in headfirst. To try to experience the Bible myself and find out what’s good in it, and what’s maybe not so relevant to the 21st century.

The book that came out of the year has several layers.

-An exploration of some of the Bible’s startlingly relevant rules. I tried not to covet, gossip, or lie for a year. I’m a journalist in New York. This was not easy.

–An investigation of the rules that baffle the 21st century brain. How to justify the laws about stoning homosexuals? Or smashing idols? Or sacrificing oxen? And how do you follow those in modern-day Manhattan?

–A look at various fascinating religious groups. I embedded myself among several groups that take the Bible literally in their own way, from creationists to snake handlers, Hasidim to the Amish.

–A critique of fundamentalism. I became the ultra-fundamentalist. I found that fundamentalists may claim to take the Bible literally, but they actually just pick and choose certain rules to follow. By taking fundamentalism extreme, I found that literalism is not the best way to interpret the Bible.

–A spiritual journey. As an agnostic, I’d never seriously explored such things as sacredness and revelation.

–A memoir of my family’s eccentric religious history, including my ex-uncle Gil, who has been, among other things, a Hindu cult leader, an evangelical Christian and an Orthodox Jew.

[From A.J. Jacobs – The Year of Living Biblically]

Perfect reading for the plane, methinks.

The Amazon blurb:

Jacobs, a New York Jewish agnostic, decides to follow the laws and rules of the Bible, beginning with the Old Testament, for one year. (He actually adds some bonus days and makes it a 381-day year.) He starts by growing a beard and we are with him through every itchy moment. Jacobs is borderline OCD, at least as he describes himself; obsessing over possible dangers to his son, germs, literal interpretation of Bible verses, etc. He enlists the aid of counselors along the way; Jewish rabbis, Christians of every stripe, friends and neighbors.

In an open-minded way he also visits with atheists, Evangelicals Concerned (a gay group), Jerry Falwell, snake handlers, Red Letter Christians–those who adhere to the red letters in the Bible, those words spoken by Jesus Himself, and even takes a trip to Israel and meets Samaritans. Through it all, he keeps a healthy skepticism, but continues to pray and is open to the flowering of real faith. Jacobs is a knowledge junky, to be sure. He enjoys the lore he picks up along the way as much as any other aspect of his experiment. One of the ongoing schticks is his meeting with the shatnez tester, Mr. Berkowitz. He is the one who determines whether or not your clothes are made of mixed fibers, in keeping with the Biblical injunction not to wear wool and linen together. The two become friends and prayer partners, in only one of the unexpected results of this year.

In the end, he says, “I’m now a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred.” Not a bad outcome.

An interview with the author here including this Q/A:

You found that following biblical rules dovetailed with your tendency toward obsessive compulsive disorder. If somebody who doesn’t have OCD did the same experiment, would they end up with it?

I think you have to be a little obsessive to do the experiment in the first place. So the question is probably unanswerable. It was fascinating, though, to see the overlap between OCD and religious rituals – an overlap Freud talked about. I actually found it comforting. Why should I come up with my own idiosyncratic rituals, when the Bible has ones that my ancestors have practiced for thousands of years?