Category Archives: The Morgue

Scottsdale, Arizona, Heat

Posted on by
Heard Museum, Scottsdale, Arizona, Lego

(photo: author)

Spent five days in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week. With the thermometer at 110°, I spent most of the time indoors. You can take a long walk in a big hotel, through and around the conventioneers. In this instance, they were at-home businesswomen—“women with projects!” a cousin said—though the company they are franchisees of is owned by men. The lobby included displays of live rattlers and a Gila monster. Every time I passed them, I did a census; they slept a lot.

The Heard Museum and its terrific Native American collection seems to get better all the time. In a gesture toward younger museum-goers, it was promoting some hands-on Lego activities, and created a Lego model of the museum (above). Docents there receive more than a hundred hours of training, so provide a lot of helpful background and interpretation.

Scottsdale is named for Winfield Scott (you have to click that link to see an example of web design gone amok. There actually is writing on the page.), a minor leader in the Civil War and army chaplain, not the famous, long-serving general Winfield Scott (“Old Fuss and Feathers”) who served in the War of 1812 and ran for President. Glad to clear that up. Plan to share your dinner if you order the ribs at the Old Town Tortilla Factory. They were tasty, but enough for one of Scott’s army units.

turquoise, silver, jewelry, earrings

(photo: author)

I had a couple of pieces of silver and turquoise jewelry with me that needed repair, since the only thing the local silver shop in Princeton has a goodly supply of is excuses why it cannot do this or that. Scottsdale’s Old Town Trading Company claims to have the area’s only Native American jeweler on site—as well as beautiful new pieces. He fixed me up and gave my vintage screwback earrings a thorough polish. Excited to wear them now.

Related articles

“The Gatekeepers” Redux

Posted on by
Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, Middle East conflict

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Fred Kaplan’s important Slate article this week about Israeli leaders’ apparent inability to think strategically about its worsening situation—at home and in the world—included a reference to the superb documentary of 2013, The Gatekeepers, originally reviewed here 3-18-13. That review is, alas, increasingly relevant, and here it is.

Saw the amazing documentary, The Gatekeepers, yesterday. It reviews the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes and words of all six surviving directors of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency. Old footage of the Six-Day War in 1968—after which Israel annexed the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza—and subsequent events—the bus bombings, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the intifadas, pinpoint bombings of Palestinian targets, meetings brokered by President Clinton—all roll on hopelessly toward the present stalemate.

To a man, these former spy chiefs, who have studied the Israeli security situation closer than anyone else, believe the hardline strategy has been a mistake, that fighting when Israel should have been working for peace has made the country less safe, not more. Continued saber-rattling takes its toll on every one of them, and their childhood dreams of a peaceful Israel have turned into a nightmare for everyone, Israeli and Palestinian alike. As one said, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This line from the New York Times review is especially apt. “It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.”

Related articles

A Quandary

Posted on by
Bitcoins

(photo: Mike Cauldwell, Creative Commons)

Can I escape this post with my First Amendment advocacy credentials intact? Doubtful.

Talking to so many accomplished writers trying mightily to get published, I’ve about decided blind luck is the key ingredient in the publication lottery. Then, in the midst of a long Wired story by Andy Greenberg on crypto-anarchy, one sentence snags my attention: Simon & Schuster has paid Cody Wilson $250,000—a figure a vanishingly small number of authors see these days—to write his memoir.

Who is Cody Wilson you ask? And why does he move to the head of the line, the top of the heap? You may recognize his name as the 26-year-old creator of the world’s first fully 3-D printable gun, which I wrote about here in May. Blueprints of his useable firearm were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days.

Wilson is also co-creator of Dark Wallet, software intended to enable fully anonymous, untraceable online payments using bitcoins. The software’s purpose is to let people anonymously trade in weapons, drugs, pornography, and general mayhem, and Wilson drapes his creation in the flag of the First Amendment. Untraceable and untouchable, he and his lawyers hope.

Since bitcoins are an international phenomenon, it’s no surprise that Iraq’s newest crop of super-violent, decapitation-loving jihadi fighters, ISIS, selectively aware of the 21st century, touts Dark Wallet as a way to fund their activities.

Wilson takes his anarchic role in stride. “Well, yes, bad things are going to happen on these marketplaces,” he says. “To quote the old civil libertarians, liberty is a dangerous thing.”

More questions for Simon & Schuster: Can he write? Does it even matter?

(if you click on either of the related links below, be sure to visit the comments.)

Related articles

Mapping the Literary Irish

Posted on by
Ireland

(photo: wikimedia)

A clever new infographic from BuyBooks appeals to both the literary impulse and the traveler’s grail—both central to this website—and maps a notable clutch of Irish literary icons. It’s tough to quarrel with any list of Emerald Isle literary figures that includes Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the incomparable Daniel, but where are G. B. Shaw (“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde? I waited in vain to find Beckett on the list and progenitor of today’s vampire obsession, Bram Stoker.

More currently, the McCorts, Malachy and Frank? Man Booker winner Roddy Doyle? Where’s Thomas Flanagan and The Year of the French—“a masterwork of historical fiction,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer? (Despite its merits, this book did not survive a run through the washing machine that I cannot explain.) For more modern history, where’s Adrian McKinty and his cop’s dilemmas during the Maze prison hunger strikes? Where, or where, is Gerry Conlon?

Wandering a bit into the peat fields here, for riveting Netflix picks, the movie based on Conlon’s book, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson, In the Name of the Father (trailer), is super, as is the biopic, Michael Collins (trailer), with Liam Neeson and an amazing cast—Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, et al. My weakness for political thrillers is showing.

Possibly Ireland is too full of literary masters to include them all on one map, but BuyBooks could have been braver and more contemporary in its picks. Which favorite authors/books of yours were left out? And here’s a more complete map.

Another Story in Tweets

Posted on by

cloudsA fan of British author David Mitchell—I know, I know, lots of people didn’t like Cloud Atlas—I’m happy he’s experimenting again. This time with a short story, “The Right Sort,” in tweets (read it here, from the bottom up). First tweet: We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’ The narrator sees the world in staccato bursts—“bite-sized sentences”—because he’s taking his mom’s Valium. I’ve read the story so far, and cannot tell yet whether this device feels like the medium calling attention to itself. Already, though, as in his excellent novel Black Swan Green, Mitchell deftly captures the voice and preoccupations of an early adolescent British male.

Mitchell has tried other innovations: a linked narrative in his first book, Ghostwritten, which takes a while to take shape in the reader’s mind (“we’re all connected”!); Number 9 Dream, where you aren’t exactly sure where the dreams begin and end, though it would make a terrific mixed manga/live-action movie; and, of course, Cloud Atlas, where you work forward in time getting the first half of five semi-linked and intergenerational stories, followed by a whole story set in the future, then step backward through the decades with the latter half of the five. (Amazon includes a reader advisory that this is NOT a misprint!) More a straight novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was one of my favorite reads of 2012.

“The Right Sort” walks “the tightrope between the fabulous and realism,” Mitchell said in a recent interview in The Guardian, and with his books, he’s proved he’s up for such highwire acts. This outing may soften up the media landscape for a new novel coming out this fall.

Related articles

Vancouver Cool

Posted on by
Vancouver, Marine building, Superman doorway

(photo: author)

Five days in Vancouver for a wedding last week. What a great city! Outdoor art, cathedral-forested Stanley Park, great food (order the salmon!), friendly people, and water views everywhere. Especially enjoyed the Aquarium (for a smile, see the sea otter cam here—I wanted to show you the jelly fish cam, because they were so spectacular, but I’m not sure it’s working; you can try), a walking tour of the city’s scattered Art Deco buildings (Vancouver is a city where the Developer is King), reminders of the 2012 winter Olympics, and being on the water. Great to leave a place with “more to see” and reasons to return. You may recognize the “Gotham” doorway at right from numerous movies!

orca, Blackfish, outdoor art, VancouverThe Aquarium is caught up in the anti-cetacean captivity controversy, touched on in this recent New Yorker article about challenges in aquarium design. The Vancouver Aquarium’s position is explained in this open letter. They are non-profit and do not keep orcas, problems about which were stunningly revealed in the documentary, Blackfish.

Related articles

**Back to Bologna

Posted on by
Bologna, Aurelio Zen, Dibdin

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Michael Dibdin – I saw a couple of these novels about Venetian detective Aurelio Zen turned into PBS Mystery presentations a few years ago, starring Rufus Sewell, and liked them a lot. But in this book, tenth in the series, Zen was whiny, ineffectual, and fixated on his recovery from surgery.

The story is peopled by egomaniacs and told with a surprising, half-comic tone, that neither aspires to nor achieves the heights of absurd human hilarity of Donald Westlake or Carl Hiassen—which made it neither fish nor fowl. By halfway through, most of the ways Dibdin would bring together the oddly-assorted elements in this Howl’s Moving Castle of a plot were

all too clear—and, most unfortunately, not very credible. Enjoyed the juicy spoof of semiotics, though. As reviewer Carlo Vennarucci said, “Dibdin didn’t take his 10th Zen novel seriously; neither should you.”

Related articles

Cabaret

Posted on by
Kit Kat Klub, Cabaret

(photo: author)

We took Alan Cumming’s advice and went to the Cabaret (opening number) last week. Possibly I saw the movie at some point, but I’d never seen the show on stage and was interested now because of Cumming. He was terrific, of course, and Michelle Williams was a much more suitable Sally Bowles than Liza Minelli in the movie, because the thing about Sally is, she’s not that talented. She’s never going to make it big. Or even medium. Especially then and there. The theater was designed to evoke the Kit Kat Klub, and instead of orchestra front, they’d installed tiny lamplit tables. The dancers stretched and warmed up on stage, interacting with the audience to further suggest the intimacy of a club. The band did more than play the music, the players were part of the drama, and some members doubled as dancers. An experience as well as a show.

We were not at the performance where Shia LaBeouf was escorted from the theatre in handcuffs—that was the next night. Apparently he took the night club setting too literally and lit up a smoke. Was disruptive. Said Entertainment Weekly, “Not everybody is wilkommen.”

Some video in this Today show interview with Cumming.

Related articles

Writing in A Digital Age

Posted on by
book ereader Kindle

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Last week in London, the Literary Consultancy held its third Writing in a Digital Age conference. Participants heard the usual hand-wringing over the issues of digital rights management, the decline in bookstores, especially independents, and the attention-sucks of our various digital tools and devices. Panelists discussed the irony that the gadgets developed to expand reading are the very same ones that can reduce it, if what we use them for is interrupting our reading time to play a game, send an email, scan Facebook, tweet a half-formed thought, watch a YouTube cat video, and check the current weather in Paris. One speaker called them digital Trojan horses.

And while these de rigueur arguments are familiar, echoing past concerns that television would be the end of radio, and video would be the end of movies, one statement by panelist Steve Bohme, who manages the Books and Consumers survey for Nielsen, sent a chill from my toes to the roots of my hair: “When everyone you know has a Kindle, why would you buy them a book?” No more buying (and receiving) books as presents? Oh, no!

Related articles

The Orchard

Posted on by
The Cherry Orchard, The Orchard, Chekhov, movie

(photo: pixabay.com)

Interesting experience recently, seeing The Orchard (trailer) at the Trenton Film Festival. In the story, filmed in real time, six actor friends get together for a weekend to prepare an improvisational performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—the world’s most performed play. Excellent score by Towering Inferno.

The movie script is something of a mashup of Chekhov and Pirandellos’ Six Characters in Search of an Author, but with its own absurdist excesses. (I’ve seen Six Characters and have forgotten it in its entirety.) With the heavy regional English accents and scenes where everyone talks at once, I missed a lot, but that seems the intent.

The private arguments over which actor should play which part suggest viewers are glimpsing intimate scenes that expose jealousies, rivalries, and personal histories. But, really, they’re scripted. After a while, the story moves seamlessly into Chekhov. And out again. Some of the non-AC scenes could be 20 percent shorter, but the cast is terrific in their actor and Chekhovian personae. As the synopsis says, after this weekend, “Will they ever be friends again?” Good question.

Personally, I think Wallace Shawn’s Vanya on 42d Street (1994) was easier to watch—another movie about trying to mount a Chekhov play, but The Orchard is a worthy effort suitable for specialty audiences with a taste for fine ensemble acting.

Related articles