upcoming

“Johnny Got His Gun” was the first book I recall which made me weep. I read it during high school because I was infatuated with the music video for “One” by Metallica which pulled its inspiration directly from the story and the video from the film. At the time, I remember being so impressed with the premise of a boy shipping off to war and coming back missing any ability to communicate, losing all his limbs, and wanting to end it all. Powerful stuff. [click to continue...]

I know it’s a ways off (july 25th) but I find myself irresistibly drawn to this reminder of what it was like to be in High School.

So color me impressed, a bit excited, and perhaps slightly concerned. Scarlett Johansson’s debut EP, a collaboration with Dave Situ of “TV on the Radio” and a collection of assorted other music heavies, is a set of 10 Tom Waits covers and 1 original song. Whoa.

You can check out the samples of the tracks just below (even though the album isn’t due out until May 20th):

Pitchfork Media has posted a nice interview with Scarlett where she goes into detail on the process of picking the music, crossing over from film to other creative endeavors, and following your muse, regardless of where it takes you.

Here’s a look at the video for the first single off of the album (with David Bowie doing some backup vocal work). As a die-hard Tom Waits fan, I’ve got to say, I love that Scarlett re-interprets the song without mangling the original. It’s surprisingly good.

I’m particularly impressed that this project is something she chose to do for herself and that it ended up taking on such a life of its own. That, in a nutshell, is what creativity is all about and I’m excited to give the album a full listen when it comes out (next Tuesday).

Other links to interesting bits:

• Amazon has a 3 minute video of Scarlett and Dave explaining the project.
• Audio podcast of Scarlett and Dave discussing the project, particularly the first single, “Falling Down.”

Other than intellectual slothfulness, is there any reason for these two trailers to be so identical? “Batman” was released in 1989. “The Dark Knight” is scheduled for July of this year.

Overall though, who’s the sucker? I’m totally going to see “The Dark Knight” anyways. I want that nostalgia. It was good the first time. It will probably be good the second time too.

Once again, kudos to Coudal for the pointer.

The trailer for the new documentary “Taxi to the Darkside” looks like it will be another fantastic documentary from the same director that made “The Smartest Guys in the Room.” A documentary tracing the unexplained detention and death of an Afghani taxi driver.

Check out the website to view the trailer. It’s worth it.

“The Bank Job” starring Jason Statham looks outstanding. The film chronicles an unsolved 1971 London bank robbery known as the “walkie-talkie bank job.” What’s compelling about this story is that the British government issued a gag order suppressing public news of the robbery within days of the heist. A modern day “Deep Throat” informer acted as testimony for the film and points to embarrassing blackmail material implicating the royal family as being the reason the story was suppressed.

See the Guardian Unlimited story here for more information on the robbery.

I can’t wait for this one. February 29th.

“Juno” - From the makers of “Thank You for Smoking,” a film about a young girl who gets pregnant and her attempts to find appropriate parents for the child.

“Great World of Sound” - Part deception, part reality. A pair of producers audition real people dreaming of being music stars.

Just a reminder from the Event Calendar that Jay Rubin, translator and writer, will be speaking at 7:30 Elliott Bay Book Co. tonight. Jay is perhaps most well known for his translation of Haruki Murakami’s works but he’s recently translated 17 stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (including Rashomon) and has also published his own book, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.

I’ll be there with a friend. If anyone else wants to meet up for a pint afterwards, let me know!

Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa on Technorati.

Great things are afoot at The Puget News. If you look on the right-hand side, you’ll see that there is now an Event Calendar listed under the Pages heading. More changes, mostly design related, are coming soon.

The Event Calendar is my look at interesting upcoming events in the Seattle area. Like a momma bird feeding its young, I head out into the vicious world, bring you back what you need to know, and regurgitate it on a cool orange calendar - which is sort of where the matephor breaks down. While I make no claims to comprehensiveness, I promise you will not starve for lack of cool things to go do.

The page has subscription options below the calendar. If you decide to hit up any of the events, let me know via the email address on the page and maybe we’ll be able to grab a “post-show pint” to discuss what we’ve seen.

I just found out this morning (thank you, Amazon Plogs) that Murakami has yet another book coming out this Spring. You can pre-order the hardcover at Amazon currently for under $15.00 on the hardcover - a screaming “buy.”

For those of you who have never read Murakami before, I’d highly recommend it. He’s definitely in both my “Top 10 Writers” and “Top 10 Books” lists - which I should probably formally create and add to this blog.

The publisher’s book description is here:

A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.

At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.

After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.