LA Times looks at why it’s been so difficult to come to an agreement in the on-going writers strike: no one has a clear understanding of what entertainment is worth, so no one really knows what they’re negotiating about. Are YouTube clips stopping us from watching TV shows or are they making us fans of them? If you can’t agree on that, you can’t agree on their value. Go read.
NYT reviews “Conversations With Woody Allen”, the new book featuring a collection of interviews with the prolific director. The verdict: “It may not be fashionable to say so, least of all in Woody Allen’s house, but the man, when he’s on form, is as capable as ever of delivering pleasure.” Amen to that. [Link]
Time’s running out on scripted shows, my fellow TV addicts. Here’s a handy chart you can look at as you prepare yourself for either giving up TV altogether or resign yourself to realty shows (shudder) - The Office is all out, 2 episodes left of 2.5 Men, 3 each of Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes and How I Met Your Mother, 5 of House - get the complete list here.
What do the following TV shows all have in common: Brothers & Sisters, Journeyman, The Wire, Bionic Woman, House M., and the Riches? No, we’re not talking of nominations - they all have Brits pretending to be Americans! [Link]
The next time you feel good about yourself when reading about Ms. Spears or her ex, remember this.
No fewer than three movies about the cocaine cartel and its kingpin, Pablo Escobar, are in the works. One is based on an adaptation of “Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw,” Mark Bowden’s best-selling 2001 book; Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) plans to direct another film, based on “Mi Hermano Pablo,” a Spanish-language memoir by Escobar’s brother and associate, Roberto; and the third is to be directed by Alexander Witt (“Resident Evil: Apocalypse”), based on original research. And Ari & Co couldn’t sell an Escobar picture in this market 
[Link]
If you’re one of those people who didn’t like the new Bond, prepare for some heart break. MGM has signed Daniel Craig for another four movies. [Link]
LA Times reviews John Updike’s new collection of pieces published in the New Yorker. The heart of “Due Considerations” consists of 60 book reviews and 10 essays published in the magazine during the new millennium. As always, the author has ranged widely: There are pieces about Orhan Pamuk and Peter Carey, Muriel Spark and Mo Yan, J.M. Coetzee’s wretched youth and Michel Houellebecq’s sexed-up maturity. The roster is heavily tilted toward the contemporary novel, especially toward those loose-and-baggy monsters that emulate their Victorian forebears. (”Nineteenth-century novelists,” Updike observes, “catered to a more generous, less nibbled attention span; they breathed with bigger lungs and naturally wrote long, deep, and wide.”) [Link]
One knew this was coming, but it hurts to be reminded nevertheless. Yes, Tom Hanks is to reprise his role as Robert Langdon in a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code for the original film’s director, Ron Howard.This time around Langdon investigates a secret society that threatens the existence of the Catholic Church. Yes folks, make way for Angels And Demons. [Link]
So far, 2007 hasn’t had any breakout hits like “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Brokeback Mountain” or “The Queen.” Ther’ve been plenty of movies which received good reviews - not all of the ones listed in this article - “A Mighty Heart,” “In the Valley of Elah”, “Lars and the Real Girl”, Richard Gere’s “The Hunting Party,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Sleuth” or Mark Ruffalo / Joaquin Phoenix’s “Reservation Road” - are still playing. But here’s your chance to show some Netflix love for Indiewood.
LA Times compares the student and the master, but refuses to draw any conclusions. Colbert’s way ahead of Stewart on the online poll at the site. Go read and vote for your favorite.
Some lucky devil who got to attend a test screening of “Sweeney Todd” insists that it is “absolutely fantastic, one of the best things Tim Burton has ever directed!” Even if that hadn’t been said, there are plenty of reasons to look forward to this horror-musical-comedy: Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen. [Link]
‘Office’ fans have apparently been making pilgrimages to Scranton, PA to check out real-life landmarks referenced on the show. With Scott-style enthusiasm, the city is now hosting a weekend blowout for thousands of fans. It starts Friday with the “Today” show’s Al Roker broadcasting live from the University of Scranton and continues through Sunday. About 2,000 tickets ranging from $25 to $250 have been sold so far — 70% of them to out-of-town fans. [Link]
The year after I graduated, my high school in Madras started making boys and girls eat their lunch in different rooms. They even had them use separate stair cases. If I though that was crazy, this article makes me feel practically grateful. One school’s banned hugging and hand-holding. Apparently it’s OK to hug, but only under dire circumstance - as in the loss of a loved one. Wow.
The latest poster boy for the horror genre, Eli Roth, recommends a virtual 24-hour horror-film festival. Entries are mostly classics (in horror, this is apparently circa 1970+) - The Thing (1982), The Vanishing (1988), The Wicker Man (1973), Who Can Kill A Child? (1976), etc. Go check out the complete list here.
Tom Perrotta, whose novels “Election” and “Little Children” were made into films by Alexander Payne and Todd Field, respectively, is now most of the way through adapting his new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” for directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the couple behind last year’s hit “Little Miss Sunshine.” The novel, which looks at a small-town culture war between a liberal sex-ed teacher and a group of evangelical Christians, was published last week. [Link]
Fall - such an apt word for this time of the year. Leaves are falling, or are supposed to (read on). Friends around me are dropping like flies - slightly different cause there, of course - the marriage pandemic or its more serious complication - children - has been busy “getting” practically everyone I know. I’m starting to understand the morbid fascination with which my grandparents used to turn to the obits as soon as they got the paper. There goes another, I tell myself everyday. Fare thee well, friend.
First the leaves: I did my very first fall-colors weekend trip on Saturday. I’m a relative newbie to fall foliage. Foliage of any sort, really. North Texas has shrubs that alternate between two states in a year - green and leaf-less. Anantha and four of his friends were kind enough to take me along to go see Bushkill Falls.
Motion sickness is a malady that refuses to go away with age… As feared, breakfast was hurled - outside the car, thanks to some nifty breaking action from Anantha. That formality out of the way, we got on with the rest of the day. We had to walk for a little bit before we got to a spot from where we could see the Delaware Valley. Green, green, green, as far as eye could see, save 
a single tree with a few non-green leaves that probably felt like a little like those people who bought their i-phones the week it came out – just a little foolish. The rest of the damn trees probably waited for us to turn our backs to them before instantaneously turning into wondrous shades of brown and gold. The only thing that was brown and orange was the water. So I suppose I shouldn’t really complain.
While on the topic of scenic getaways, I don’t really get the point of these “hiking / trekking” outings. If the point is to admire nature, one doesn’t really get to do it - as you have to keep your eyes on the ground all the time, at least as long as you retain a wish to not tumble down some conveniently placed gorge or two. When you do look up from time to time, most of your focus is on catching your breath, trees and skies be damned. However, I will admit that as you get increasingly light headed, you start to see the light, in a way. As Anantha slowly walked up, pausing every now and then to take the millionth photo of some picturesque pebble or stream, I huffed and puffed beside him, and before I knew it, I’d realized who I wanted to be when I grew up. I want to be just like T, one of my team mates from work. T is about 55 years old, and knows exactly what he wants from life and gets just that - nothing more, nothing less. He doesn’t give a damn about what people think of him, but is unfailingly “kind and gentle” (his words) towards the fools he has to suffer. I tell myself that as soon as I get off this damn hill, I’ll learn to have the courage to stick to my own guns, whatever they are at a given point. I also realize that this moment of absolute clarity will have vanished once my circulation returns to its usual sluggish flow and I return to the real world. But these fleeting moments of faux epiphanies are precisely why you go risking life, or at the very least a limb or two on some Pennsylvanian hill. So yes, I got my money’s worth.
Potentially life altering epiphanies apart, it was also very instructive to observe our little group composed of one married couple and three single people. The single people, without exception, did the mandatory “photos for mom to distribute to other single people and their moms” thing. I wonder what purpose these photos serve, if any. Proof that you are not so big a loser that you have no friends at all and have had to resort to a professional photographer? That you possess motor skills enough to actually get yourself to the top of a hill or a waterfall or whatever spot you’re posing from? It’s lovely, the way we desis try to optimize the experience - the photo has to include some feature in the background and also portray you in a favorable light. This requirement invariable leads to shots of people in one corner of the frame with interesting rock / building / other natural or man-made artifacts also featured prominently. After all, the photo is for the people being photographed too! Proof that I too was young and traveled to all sorts of interesting places once.
Have you noticed how the people in these photographs (irrespective of gender or age) all look alike? They all have the same look in their eyes – the one that uniquely combines desperation, fear, and plain old fury - “please, let me look good enough for my mom to not bully me into another one of these for another 12 to 18 months… but not attractive enough to get a call back from that undekha unjaana dreamboat psychopath who will invariably look at this photo 2.4 months from now, by which time I will have lost these 10 pounds! So what the f*&# is the point of this photo anyway?”
Sometimes I worry these pictures will eventually come back to bite me in the ass - as so many things do in life. The ideal future, of course, has me sitting on a rocking chair (my hair’s greying at the temples, but is still all there, and I’ve lost 25 pounds - with all the diseases I’m bound to get, a little gratuitous weight loss is the least am owed), looking at these pictures and chuckling to myself. But considering I won’t remember the reason I photographed that block of wood because there was an icky aphid on it (which btw, you can’t see on the finished product) next week, imagine the amount of agitation that particular photo is going to cause, whenever I am jobless enough to actually look at it again. I will probably waste many minutes wondering why the hell I thought that piece of wood was important. The pictures before and after that shot have me smiling - I looked so happy then, was it that stupid piece of wood that made me smile so? Do those etchings stand for someone’s initials? Who was EBW? (at least I think that’s what it looks like…) E.B White? Yes, I did love the New Yorker in those days, but enough to go around carving E.B White’s initials into pieces of wood? And wasn’t he long dead in 2007? Maybe that crazy off focus shot five pictures ago was his ghost…I suspect this is how those crazy stories that old people always have get invented. Or was I simply high? I won’t remember shit, but do depend on myself to make something up.
But to return to the picture taking exercise. The married couple did not bother taking photos of each other. They have already crossed that bridge. R intermittently recorded stuff on a camcorder. We all waved at it a second or two after we realized that we were supposed to do stuff, and not just stand there. Desi’s have only caught on as far as posing for photographs, I think. The whole motion thing continues to surprise us. I wonder what people do with these recordings? These trips usually involve at least one or two people one isn’t really close friends with. Years from now, I can imagine R and his wife wondering who the devil that girl with the glasses is. They will accuse all their known friends of bringing me along. Then one of them will remember I was the chick who threw up on the way. If R is super anal about passing on his digital wealth to his progeny, I will go down in R family history as that unknown female who threw up on grandpa’s trip some where in the US, and why it is vital to always carry Dramamine on road trips. This is how you achieve immortality.
Of course, we weren’t the only people obsessed with taking pictures. At the end of the trail, there was a statue of a bear in what I assume is the mauling position. Practically every child and every third adult took a picture with this thing. One woman repeatedly instructed her daughter to hold the bear’s paw and look sad. She then asked the little girl to hug the bear. Don’t know what that was supposed to depict. That she was sad about being mauled by a concrete bear and then it actually mauled her? I wish I could hear whatever story this little girl will come up with when looking at that picture years from now.
Thanks to the evil device we call a digital camera, documentation of an experience has come to replace the experience itself. Not content with merely recording television shows and weddings, we’ve moved on to recording our entire lives for later perusal, whenever that may be. Every experience we’ve come to feel is “significant” (and remember the most boring things might become damn significant 50 years from now when you can no longer remember how to spell your own name) and hence worthy of documentation - every trip we ever take, every pebble or dead insect we were even remotely curious about on said travels… After all, if you have a picture where you’re smiling a lot, you must have had fun! Do this digital recording on a grander, helluva lot more expensive scale and you’ll have yourselves a wedding! Yaay! The first of many proofs that one’s done all one is supposed to’ve done.
Al Gore is the only man to have won an Emmy, an Oscar, and a Nobel. The only award that he has to win to make what Mo Rocca calls “The Gore Crown” is the Tony. Go vote for what musical you think Gore should star in for that missing Tony. [Link]
According to the 2007 U.N. World Drug Report, the percentage of Europeans who use illicit drugs is about half that of Americans. Europe also has fewer than half as many deaths from overdoses. Rick Steves examines how they have managed to do that. [Link]
Doris Lessing wins Nobel for Literature. She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.” [Link]