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 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.
I was excited to learn today that China Mieville, he of fantastical monster-fiction fame, has released a new book for a younger audience, and a female audience at that! Sure to be a late night page-turner, it comes out tomorrow (so you can still get your pre-order discount at Amazon). Buy it for one of those brainy kids you know who “read too much” and then steal it for a day or two yourself!
Without having read this book, I’m betting it’s one of those books for twisted children, the ones like me, who loved to read dark fairy tales and stories where good does not always triumph over evil.
Here’s a little quote from the Wired article where I discovered this:
The latest example is British fantasy writer China Miéville, whose Un Lun Dun follows a young girl’s quest to save a creepy parallel-universe London. And for Miéville, best known for a steampunk trilogy full of superhot, beetle-headed women and nightmare-eating monsters, it’s a new direction. He’s written something that kids, especially young girls, will devour.
A couple of you are signed up to read this with me already, but here is the tentative plan. We will get the books here no later than 23rd and take roughly a month to read it through. The goal is to finish by Christmas and then to go out and celebrate when everyone is back in Seattle from Christmas break. Everyone, feel free to join us! This is not a book to read alone - I promise.
Read the rest of this entry »
November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the month where thousands of aspiring novelists take advantage of the seasonally poor weather (especially here in the Puget Sound), trade in their self-censoring generally overly-judgmental attitudes, and focus purely on the production of writing a novel - no matter how bad it is. Hellbent on the production of 2,000 words a day, these folks labor towards the completion of a 175-page (50,000 word) novel while their progress is shared, encouraged, and tracked at the NaNoWriMo website.
It’s a worthy endeavor, a task to which I aspire - perhaps next year - and the folks I know who have participated have lauded the benefits of it freeing their creative processes.
The reason I bring this up is that I’ve been following Matthew Baldwin’s attempt over at the ever-hilarious Defective Yeti to read “Moby Dick” this month. I don’t know if the clever creation of the “NoNoReMo” moniker is his, but since he’s the first person I’ve seen use it, and I could find no central “NoNoReMo” website using a cursory Google search, I’m giving him credit. His “Moby Dick” reading excursions are frequently blogged and always contain hilarious observations about the experience. So far, I’m harboring doubts as to whether Matthew will be successful - he hasn’t updated the attempt since November 6th but I love what he’s produced so far - even it means that “Moby Dick” moves further down my priority list of “Books to Read”.
The reason I bring all of this up is that several people, including myself (you know who you are), have decided to collectively read a big novel coming out near the end of this month. While we have no need to tie ourselves to a 1-month goal on this, it would be best not to drag this out. We’ll probably aim to finish by Christmas or New Year. I don’t want to write about it longer than that and even indulgent readers would have their patience tested.
Well, I guess I know what I’ll be reading over my Christmas holiday. I can picture it now, “Against the Day” rocketing up the New York Times bestseller list as tens of thousands of pounds of new Pynchon pages sit snugly under Christmas trees throughout the land. How many of these will go unread just due to shear the sheer 900-plus-page intimidation factor? My guess - most of them.
Alas, I am bit of a Pynchon fiend, having read all of his works to date. No reason to stop now.
Pre-order your copy on Amazon.com today and we’ll talk about the novel after the holiday. Yes, I know it is 4 months away but when you know already with so much certitude what you’ll be doing, why not make plans now? Feel free to contact me if you want to meet about the book together. Pynchon is much more fun when you’re not alone.