Wednesday, May 30, 2007

So what do you want me to get out of this show?

1. So the Sopranos ends on Sunday. Any ideas about what's going to happen? Tony is killed or goes to jail? Too predictable. Meadow gets killed? Too Godfather III. A.J. goes to work for the Taliban? Now we're talking. I do hope it manages to come close to meeting everyone's (very high) expectations, but I think it's almost bound to disapoint.

2. In other high-culture news, didja catch Cormac McCarthy--"maestro of high-literary horse operas"--on Oprah the other day? Me neither. There's an entertaining--though very mean--discussion on Slate about it, in case you're curious.

3. Tintin seems to be all the rage at the moment. The usually brilliant Anthony Lane has a pretty good piece in The New Yorker from May 28 that will be of interest to all Tintinologists. It is, alas, not available on the interwebs, though you can read an abstract of the essay here.

4. You can find the trailer for Anton Corbijn's Control--about Ian Curtis of Joy Division fame here. I'll acknowledge that the subject matter is dark, but still, this is a bit much.

5. So I was in Brookline Booksmith in lovely Brookline, MA, a few weeks ago and discovered that, hidden away in the fiction section, they have a little section (sub-section?) called "Espionage". In said sub-section. amidst a lot of familiar stuff--Eric Ambler, Furst, McCarry--I came across a bunch of books by a guy I had never heard of before named Gerald Seymour. Mr. Seymour is a British reporter who has covered all sorts of messy stuff, including the Vietnam War, the Munich Olympics massacre, and the Italian Red Brigades. I finished my first one--Traitor's Kiss--a few nights ago and it is astounding. It tells the story of the efforts of MI6 to rescue a Russian double agent who's been compromised. Really good stuff--I couldn't put it down.

6. The latest of John Burdett's Bangkok novels, Bangkok Haunts, arrived in the mail yesterday. I started it as a dozed off last night and so far so good. I'll let you know how it goes, but, in the meantime, the earlier books, Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo are highly recommended if you like middle-brow police procedurals and don't mind a soupcon of Buddhism sprinkled on top.

Editor's Note: I apologize for any typographical errors in this post. I wrote this in a hurry and the spell-checker in the new version of Blogger blows. That is all.

Posted by jwb at 7:58 AM  · 3 Comments   

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Home is where the hardest

1. So maybe this Tintin movie thing won't be such a clusterfuck after all. This story from the Times is moderately reassuring. Thankfully, they're going to keep it a cartoon.

2. Herewith is an interesting story from The New Yorker about the British "guerilla" artist Banksy. In other news, Banksy is no longer so mysterious.

3. The Office season finale was hilarious. I was particularly interested in reading Creed's blog. Now that I have, I have to confess that it's kind of lame.

4. So what do you think: Jordin or Blake? Though I was wrong about last week, I'll stick with my prediction that Jordin will win.

5. I see that The Good German--much discussed in this space--is just out on DVD. I suppose I'll have to give it a shot. Jenn has been reading the book, and I'm interested in what she thinks about it. In other similarly-named-spy-movie news, we watched The Good Shepherd over the weekend. I'll confess that while I enjoyed it, it was a bit of a mess. I gather that it is a semi-fictionalized take on James Jesus Angleton, the original counter-inteligence chief at the CIA. There's a ton of good material there, so perhaps we should hope that someone else will take another shot at it before too long.

6. I'm about two-thirds of the way through Christopher's Ghosts and it's quite excellent. (Among other things, there's lots of terrifying stuff about Nazi torture--sorry, interrogation--techniques in the first section that are no doubt intended to tell us somthing about things going on in our own world.) That said, I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone new to the McCarry books. You're better off starting back at the beginning of the series (discussed here). Trust me on this.

Posted by jwb at 1:00 PM  · 3 Comments   

Thursday, May 10, 2007

I'm gonna wow you


I heard through the grapevine that certain people think I blog too much, which, I imagine, will seem like a joke to our regular readers. Anyway, more of the usual:

1. Zut alors! It appears that the "Five Second Rule" is BS. But we knew that already.

2. We haven't had much to say about Idol here this year--You're welcome--but we're in the home stretch and I thought I'd ask our readers what they think about our final three. I think Blake goes home next week--the beat-box thing is getting old and he's simply not as good a singer as the other two. Melinda is a better singer than Jordin, but she's really boring. Advantage: Jordin. Though we'll see. Song choice is so crucial, you know.

3. Speaking of endings, only four more weeks of "The Sopranos". I've only recently discovered the massive amount of Sopranoiana on the interweb ("It's a series of tubes"). However, if you're interested, Sopranos Monday on The House Next Door is worth your attention.

4. I "heart" the movie "Wall Street," but have to admit that I'm a mite ambivalent about the idea of a sequel. I'll go out on a lim here and predict that it'll either be really cool or really bad. On the plus side, the hedge fund culture does seem ripe for some lampooning. (Tom Wolfe gave it a shot here, but the results are almost as boring as Melinda.)

5. This--the trailer for "Hot Rod", with Andy Samberg and Al Swearengen--is pretty funny. Sure, the movie will probably suck, but we can hope.

6. In case you missed it, Conan's visit to Lucsfilm/ILM is pretty funny. (Via TWS.) Part 2 is here.

More anon. Seacrest out.

UPDATE: I just got home from the vet with Buzzy--who, let's say, has a slight indigestion problem; in case you're eating lunch, I'll leave it at that--and found my copy of Charles McCarry's Christopher's Ghosts amongst the mail. Regular readers will know that I think McCarry's books about CIA agent Paul Christopher are unparalleled in the espionage literature. It's difficult to express in blogspeak how much I am looking forward to reading this book.

Posted by jwb at 8:40 AM  · 4 Comments