Category Archives: The Morgue

Shall We Kiss?

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Michaël Cohen, Julie Gayet, Shall We Kiss?

Michaël Cohen & Julie Gayet in Shall We Kiss?

The 2007 French movie (Un baiser s’il vous plaît)(trailer) is light summer fare, more rom than com, more sweet amusement that LOL, “more quirky than wacky,” as reviewer Roger Moore said in the Orlando Sentinel.

A Parisienne (the delectable Julie Gayet) stranded on the empty streets of Nantes with no taxis in sight accepts a ride to her hotel from a stranger (Michaël Cohen), the ride leads to dinner together and obvious attraction, and that leads to his request for a goodnight kiss, “a kiss without consequences,” as they are both involved with other people.

She says no and is persuaded (in fact this entire movie is filled with effectively clever persuasion) to tell him the story that she says would explain her refusal. That story becomes the majority of the movie, which Stephen Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer, calls “impossibly French.”

Kisses can be very powerful, at least they are to the couple she describes, played charmingly by Virginie Ledoyen and Emmanuel Mouret, who also wrote and directed the film. They have been best friends for years and he, in a funk over his lack of physical connection with anyone, persuades her—a married woman—to kiss him. And, while the premise may be a little unrealistic, it’s lighthearted fun, delivered smoothly.

In the end, good choices have been made, some of which may be more bitter than sweet, and none of which were without consequences.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 77%; audiences 62%.

What’s NOT a Business Plan

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Dr. Seuss

(photo: US Army Garrison, Red Cloud, creative commons license)

Harvard Business Review recently added its voice to the clamor for changes in the $28 billion U.S. publishing industry. The article, by writer Dorie Clark, a marketing strategist based at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, is headlined “Harper Lee and Dr. Seuss Won’t Save Publishing.”

By relying not only on those obvious one-offs and other “successful retreads,” but also emphasizing authors who have what publishers call a pre-existing platform—which means either past books, a painstakingly built social media presence, speaker popularity, or high visibility in other media (movie stars, television commentators, high-profile journalists)—publishers are missing partnerships with less prominent authors. Such relationships used to be cultivated over the long term, giving publishers a deep bench.

Publishers don’t treat authors the way a venture capitalist or angel investor might, notes Suw Charman-Anderson in Forbes. Some of the authors on that bench were future stars and others solid mid-list performers. The whole timid approach is reminiscent of Hollywood’s love affair with sequels, prequels, and copycat films.

Authors today have a choice; if publishers aren’t willing to invest in them, they can look elsewhere, to smaller presses or self-publishing. In the past, the major publishers could offer authors their expertise in distribution, design, editing, proofreading, and marketing. Distribution has had a tectonic change with the advent of e-books and print-on-demand; increasingly sophisticated design, editing, and proofreading services are available for authors to contract with directly; and only the most highly successful (or happily delusional) author expects the publisher to take sole charge of their book’s marketing any more.

Clark recommends the following strategies to reinvigorate their relationships with authors:

  • Become full partners with authors, looking to the long term; think of them as the seed-corn necessary to harvest future profits.
  • Be more transparent with data (in late October I’ll be receiving my royalty statement from a textbook publisher that will provide up-to-the-minute-as-of-last-April sales information); no way can authors help with promotion when they’re working with arcane, six-month-old data. What’s more, as best-selling author Ken Follett says, “(Royalty) statements are carefully designed to prevent the author knowing what is really happening to his book.” (Clark says Penguin Random House has a new author portal that tracks weekly sales. This is a first.)
  • Build their own brand and audience. With all the industry consolidations that have occurred in recent years, if readers had an impression of a particular publisher, that entity may no longer exist, at least not independently.
  • Connect authors to one another for “cross-pollination” of marketing and literary ideas.
  • Double down on quality. Readers of books from all sources, including big publishers, lament the typographical and factual errors and negligent editing they encounter, even in books they’ve paid top-dollar for.

Such strategies could assure publishers’ profitability for years to come, because, as Clark said, “hoping to find another lost manuscript is not a business plan.”

Further Thoughts

Industry-watcher Michael Shatzkin says changes in publishing are, maybe, inevitable?

Fall Books Already Creating Buzz

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The remainder of 2015 is shaping up beautifully for readers of literary fiction. Lists of forthcoming novels by well-known—as well as new—authors promise a rich season ahead and delightful holiday giving.

Flood of Fire, Amitav GhoshThe Millions has a lengthy list of these, and I’ve picked out just few novels, one book of short stories, and one biography:

  • Flood of Fire: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy) by Amitav Ghosh – about the first Opium War. I enjoyed his Sea of Poppies, first in this trilogy and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and The Atlantic Monthly calls him “a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.”
  • Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson – a collection of six stories, which I would definitely read having found his Pulitzer-winning The Orphan Master’s Son so powerful.
  • The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood – winner of the Man Booker in 2000. Her new book is about “a near-future in which the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free.”
  • Fates and Furies, Lauren GroffFates and Furies: A Novel by Lauren Groff – delves into the symbolism of Greek mythology to fully plumb the mysteries of a couple’s marriage. Read the opening sex-on-the-beach scene to find out how it all started. Her story “Ghosts and Empties” appeared in the 7-20-15 issue of The New Yorker.
  • Slade House: A Novel by David Mitchell – I’ve read five of his previous novels and enjoyed them all. Slade House began as a story in tweets.
  • Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. If you know her from public radio’s This American Life, you know how funny and smart her social commentary is.
  • The Daughters: A Novel by Adrienne Celt—this “virtuosic debut” is “a gorgeous, riveting story about family, mythology, and curses,” says Book Riot.
  • The Big Green Tent: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya – Russia’s most popular novelist describes what tThe Big Green Tent, Ludmila Ulitskayahe USSR was like in the 1950s and has become “a voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians,” said Masha Gessen’s review in The New Yorker. Sounds dangerous.

Also coming soon are books by an impressive phalanx of well-known writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, Patti Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Jane Smiley, Umberto Eco, Oscar Hijeulos (posthumously), and Marilynne Robinson.

Feeding your Reading Soul

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Love the premise behind Shari’s Berries Book + Dessert Pairing Guide. Gone Girl? Raspberry crepes. Alice in Wonderland? Tea biscuits and jam. The most inspired mix of gustatory and cultural delight since cinema sips—“A Modern Guide to Film and Cocktail Pairings.”

reading, apple

He must be reading “The Turk Who Loved Apples”! (photo: Greg Myers, creative commons license)

Now, what goes best with the recent books I’ve read and the movies based on them?

  • Seveneves—whatever. In the bleakness of space, when you’re eating algae, even a matzoh would be divine
  • Blue Labyrinth—a Blue Hawaii that’s a really Aloysius Pendergast-worthy one, what else?
  • The Breaks—those folks should be drinking Jack on the rocks and lots of it
  • Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store—lemon mousse, though it need not glow in the dark
  • The Storm Murders—awesome cajun food (no poutine, even though most of the story takes place in Quebec)
  • Inherent Vice—hash brownies, no contest!
  • Mr. Holmes—a honey pie

The extent to which readers link reading and eating is dreadfully apparent to anyone who takes a best-seller out of the library and finds greasy crumb-marks, and often the crumbs themselves squished between its pages.

Your Literary Dream Vacation

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road trip, map, travel

(photo: rabi w, creative commons license)

Need an organizing principle for your next vacation? Here are four literary-themed travel ideas, heavy on the mystery element:

See the U.S.A.

I’ve written before about Esotouric’s fun mystery/literary tours of SoCal. They scout out the locations of sites in classic books by Raymond Chandler (and other authors), researching “the mean streets that shaped his fiction” and inspired such lines as “There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream” from The Long Goodbye. Next Raymond Chandler tour: 8-22-15.

Not available that day? The following week the possibly even juicier “Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice” tour covers the history of the “ribald, racy, raunchy old promenade where the better people simply did not travel.” Something always cooking there.

Atlas Obscura has created an “obsessively detailed map of American Literature’s most epic road trips.” Follow in the footsteps (or the oil pan drips) of such non-fiction bushwhackers as William Least Heat Moon (Blue Highways)—I’ve read this book, and it’s great—Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Mark Twain (Roughing It), and nine other classics that describe “this quintessentially American experience.” Literature AND a map. Can’t get much better.

And NYC by neighborhood from the New York Public Library.

Across the Pond

In case you want something a little more, ahem, Continental, the San Francisco Chronicle has created a map that marks literary highlights of Paris’s Left Bank and includes classic book shops as well as author pilgrimage sites. You can spend a day’s worth of shoe-leather on this one, easy.

Prefer a more sedentary mode of travel? By bus, perhaps (the big advantage of which is all that reading time and three beers at the pub, no problem!). The Smithsonian offers “Mystery Lover’s England,” which explores “the lives and settings of famous detective novelists”: Colin Dexter, Andrew Taylor, Simon Brett, Agatha Christie, and the like, plus the haunts of the characters they wrote about in Devon, the Cotswolds, Oxford, and London. But why anyone would want to risk going to Oxford, with its astounding murder rate—which the Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis, and Endeavor have shown on the telly—is beyond me.

Related articles

Mr. Holmes

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Ian McKellen, Mr. Holmes, Sherlock

Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes

In Mr. Holmes (trailer), it’s post-war England, and the elderly Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen), lives on a remote property on the Sussex coast. He tends his bees and shuns detecting, ever since the tragic conclusion of his last case some 35 years earlier. But he’s bothered by John Watson’s account of the case and a movie about it, both of which got the wrong end of the stick.

Between stretches of mentoring his housekeeper’s young son Roger in the details of managing an apiary, avoiding his housekeeper (played to a “T” by Laura Linney), who is apprehensive his declining physical state and advancing dementia will soon be too much for her to handle, trying unproven botanical memory aids, and enjoying terrific view of Seven Sisters white cliffs, Holmes has taken pen in hand to write his own record of that final case. Its details are elusive and come back to him only in fits and starts.

The movie is based on a 2005 literary mystery by Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind, which “is not a detective story; it’s a work of literary fiction, and as such it’s much more interested in the mysteries Holmes can never solve,” said Salon reviewer Laura Miller.

Director Bill Condon obtained fine performances by McKellen and Linney, as well as the strong supporting cast, including Roger Allam (who plays Holmes’s doctor), Milo Parker (Roger), Hattie Moraham (as the principal in his last case), and Hiroyuki Sanada (who provides Holmes some of his botanicals, but issues his own challenge to the aging detective). Late in life, that challenge teaches Holmes an important lesson.

For my taste there was too much aging and not enough mystery. Perhaps Monsters and Critics’ Ron Wilkinson captured the problem when he wrote, “A charming but fatally slow exposition.” Too, more should have been done cosmetically to differentiate the 93-year-old Holmes from the flashbacks of him at age 58.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 87%; audiences, 78%.

Weekend Double-Play

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The Guardsman

Jon Barker, Victoria Mack, The Guardsman, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

Jon Barker & Victoria Mack in STNJ’s The Guardsman

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (STNJ) continues its 2015 season—a celebration of Bonnie J. Monte’s 25th season as artistic director—with another play about actors, this one The Guardsman, by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. In it, a young actor begins to suspect his wife is tiring of him and pretends to be a member of the Royal Guard—he can do wigs and costumes after all—to see whether she’ll be tempted. At the end, it seems he’s learned more about himself than he has about her constancy.

The play has many laugh-out-loud moments as the actor struggles to maintain two personas at the same time. Should he be flattered that the actress seems attracted to the dashing guardsman, or offended? He’s both, alternatingly. Talented company regular Jon Barker conveys every bit of this confusion with his expressive body language. Victoria Mack as his wife plays a more opaque character, and in the talk-back at the end, the audience was divided about whether she saw through his disguise. Brent Harris was excellent as the Critic, who is the foil to both actors’ longings.

The play has been mounted several times in English, and is usually played as romantic farce, but Monte believes its frivolous exterior has obscured darker messages at its heart. To pursue this line of thought, she obtained a new literal translation by the playwright’s great-grandson and used that for her adaptation. She found it has “an extraordinary provocative, ground-breaking, heart-breaking, and disturbing inner core” that provokes gales of laughter at the same time it “questions identity, reality, perception and what it takes to validate our existence.”

Love’s Labour’s Lost

On Sunday, we saw Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of his many comedies about romantic confusion, this year’s outdoor stage production by the STNJ. Excellent comedic performances by the entire cast. I had both my sun and rain umbrellas with me, though the threatened rain never materialized. These productions are always a highlight of the summer, and the cast manages not to faint in the heat, despite their elaborate costumes and the play’s lively staging, including running up the stairs of the amphitheater at the College of St. Elizabeth.

outdoor theater, STNJ

Set for the outdoor production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, STNJ

Coming Up Next

Yesterday was the last performance for both these plays, a successful continuance of this anniversary season. Next up: Shaw’s Misalliance, August 5 – 30, in which Shaw “gleefully exposes and dismantles the idiosyncrasies of the British classes and their various ‘family values.’”

Also, some critics believe The Guardsman inspired Harold Pinter’s The Lover, whose similar plot likewise melds comedy and drama and has been played both ways. STNJ will have a reading of The Lover on Monday evening, August 17, to explore those possibilities.

Body of Evidence: Cameras in Policing

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angry man, police

(photo: Danny Hammontree, creative commons license)

State and local governments and police departments across the country are adopting body cameras for patrol officers. They can learn a lot about the benefits, risks, and unanticipated consequences of this policy from the several departments that have pioneered use of this technology, as Mike Maciag described in a recent Governing article.

In total, an estimated 22 to 33% of police departments are already using cameras. Rapid adoption without thinking through the necessary supporting policies, training needs, and long-term budgetary implications may cause this generally positive trend in policing to falter. The 7/31 release of body cam footage related to the death of Samuel Dubose in Hamilton County, Ohio, will increase calls for adoption.

Data Storage & Analysis

A hidden cost of the cameras is in the storage, retrieval, and analysis of data. “It’s the expense related to data storage—not the purchase of the cameras—that typically ends up being most costly for departments,” says Miciag, particularly for departments that keep footage for a year or more. (Video considered evidence in a court case might be kept much longer.) Writing up routine reports may take longer, if officers need to make sure their report jibes with the video. Departments must respond to requests for video from prosecutors, defense attorneys, the media (in some jurisdictions), and even citizens under state freedom of information laws or departmental policy.

Human Factors

Younger officers in tune with the YouTube era are more receptive to the cameras. “Typically, senior officers don’t see the value of the video or want the video unless it saves them,” said Kelvin Wright, police chief of Chesapeake, Va., which has used cameras since 2009. Traffic officers, accustomed to in-car cameras, also have been more welcoming. Policies need to be in place regarding when the camera should be turned on, as well as when it should not be turned off. In Daytona Beach, turning off the camera to avoid being recorded is grounds for firing. The cameras don’t record 24/7, because police need to be able to have private conversations and moments and to interview confidential informants.

Citizen Privacy

Not all jurisdictions/departments require that officers tell the public they are being recorded. A concern is whether people involved in a domestic dispute, for example, will not call police because they don’t want their grievances publicly available. Some departments require that cameras be switched off in medical facilities and other specific settings.

Benefits

On one hand, the Chesapeake department has found a sharp reduction in complaints against officers when citizens know their interaction is recorded, and many complaints can be quickly invalidated by the recordings. On the other, use-of-force incidents declined in a 2012 study of the Rialto, Calif., department. Analysts believe both police and citizens are more cooperative when cameras are present. And the footage is can be useful in other situations: letting community leaders see the imminent threat that led to a nonfatal police shooting in Daytona Beach defused a potentially confrontational situation. “Everybody behaves better when the cameras are on,” said Daytona police chief Michael Chitwood.

UPDATE 7/22/15

The disturbing footage of the traffic stop of Sandra Bland, which ended with her death in a Houston, Texas, cell a few days later highlights a number of challenges in using cameras in policing. Bland’s interaction with Texas state trooper Brian Encinia was captured not by a body-cam, but by a dashboard camera in his vehicle. The sound quality is excellent, despite the distance of the camera from the interaction.

Glitches in the footage–believed by some commenters to be “editing” of the video and by others as malfunctioning equipment–are sowing confusion in the case and beg for authoritative clarification. Trooper Encinia appears to lose his temper and escalate the situation quickly, when facing the initially uncooperative Bland. This is the opposite of how police officers are trained to behave.

Once he has her out of her car, the action moves to the side, and the camera no longer captures the video, though continues to record audio. A passerby recorded some of that interaction on his cell phone, however. Then, three days later, Sandra Bland dies in her cell, apparently between 7 and 9 a.m. Video of the hallway outside her cell reportedly shows no one in the area. Her death is called a suicide; friends and family don’t believe it.

People all over the country have seen this video now, as it was released to the media. However good the video is, alone or in combination with the cell phone footage, does it tell the full story of the arrest and trooper Encinia’s actions? What precipitated Bland’s death? Regardless of how incomplete information is so far, judgments will be made because people have “seen what went down,” and inevitably will interpret it according to their own experiences and opinions.

Philadelphia Gem

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museum, Jews, Philadelphia, National Museum of American Jewish History

(photo: wikipedia)

Right alongside Philadelphia’s Independence Mall (you know, National Constitution Center, Liberty Bell, Independence Hall), at Market and 5th Street is the National Museum of American Jewish History, a five-story exhibition space, opened in 2010. You start at the top, in the special exhibit space, and work your way down.

 

On the top floor currently is a exhibition of Richard Avedon’s portrait photos from the 1970s. Quite a rocky trip down memory lane seeing the pictures of the Nixon-era politicos practically giving off whiffs of scandal and napalm.

The next three floors are devoted to the permanent exhibition,a chronological exploration of Jewish history in America. They are a warren of connecting galleries that makes the most of the space and the creative display of information. The first (top) of these floors is themed “Foundations of Freedom,” about the earliest Jewish arrivals, in the period 1654 to 1880. Their experiences as immigrants, earning a living and becoming established in communities across the country were fascinating. While we think of the early 20th century Ashkenazi settlers from Germany, Poland, and Russia as representing American Jewry, many of the earliest settlers were Sephardic and came from Spain and Portugal via London and South America. Thus, Charleston, as a southern city, was an early settlement hub and in 1800 had the country’s largest Jewish population.

The “Dreams of Freedom” exhibit on the third floor covers the period 1880-1945, including the big migration years, the shift of the Jewish population center to New York, and the impact of two World Wars. A portion of this floor covers the contribution of Jewish people in many areas of life–manufacturing, industry, marketing, the labor movement–as well as to the arts and entertainment industries, including a film clip of Groucho Marx’s classic, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It!” newly relevant today. The second floor reviews 1945 to today, and we’d run out of time and didn’t linger. There’s a lovely gift shop and a café.

We ate lunch a few blocks away at the Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum Bar. It was too early in the day to take full advantage of the rum bar, but the Old Havana atmosphere was fun and the food and service good. This restaurant is an outpost of a small chain that also has restaurants in Washington, DC, Orlando, and Atlantic City, NJ.

Inherent Vice

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Inherent Vice, Joaquin Phoenix, Thomas PynchonWhen this film (trailer) of a Thomas Pynchon novel was released in 2014, critics said it was undoubtedly the ONLY Pynchon book that could be corralled into a film. I’m a big Pychon fan—loved V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Mason & Dixon—but I started Gravity’s Rainbow three times and never got past page 100. So I can sympathize with the difficulties director Paul Thomas Anderson must have faced.

Joaquin Phoenix plays “Doc” Sportell, a private investigator subject to regular harassment from a police detective called Bigfoot (Josh Brolin). Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta has taken up with a wealthy married property developer, and the developer’s wife wants her to cooperate in a plot to institutionalize him so she and her new boyfriend can raid his bank account. Then the magnate disappears. Doc uses is slight investigative skills to search for both the developer and Shasta in a stoner’s 1970s Southern California.

This set-up takes you down colorful and unexpected byways, which I couldn’t possibly reconstruct, and a multitude of stars provide performance gems: Owen Wilson as a mixed up dude-dad, afraid to leave the drug cult that’s captured him; Hong Chau as the hilariously matter-of-fact operator of a kinky sex club; Martin Short as a cradle-robbing dentist, with his clinic in a building shaped like a golden fang; Golden Fang itself, a mysterious criminal operation that . . . None of this probably matters. Neo-Nazi biker gangs, yogic meditation, stoners. You just have to go with it. Joaquin Phoenix, understandably, displays about a zillion different ways of looking confused.

If you have a taste for the absurd and what Movie Talk’s Jason Best calls “freewheeling spirit,” this is definitely the movie for you! I try to guess whether audiences or critics will like a movie better. Right on the money this time: Rotten Tomatoes Critics Rating: 73%; audiences, 53%.