Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

I enjoyed it a lot when I read it a few years back - it is incredibly...busy...in a largely really fun, free-wheeling way!

I suspect Hofmann's translation is lively, and I would like to know Doblin [afraid I can't make the umlaut on here] as Brecht and Benjamin debated him so much around 1930. I imagine the book is long but I would like to read it if I could make time one day. Actually I think the idea has appealed to me for a long time simply because I like the actual Alexanderplatz.

Just finished: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie - convoluted Poirot written during wartime, so full of stuff about Nazis, Communist agitators, plucky British spies, old v new values etc - all red herrings, in the end. The speed and economy of Christie's storytelling is impressive in a reckless sort of way - lots of dialogue, one or two line paragraphs, short chapters, vast subjects (the nature of capitalism eg) dealt with in a imperiously superficial way - it's still the essence of bestsellerdom, but tied to a vanished social world.

Just starting: Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Morbz once seemed to suggest on here that the real way for serious RWF headz to watch the 'plazt was in two 7 1/2 hour viewings in some arthouse cinema near you. I found that idea not good and just watched it like I would The Sopranos or whatever - one ep at a time.

I did this at the ICA screening xyzz mentions and it showed me that it was very much not the way to see it - the opening and closing credits between each ep really driving home that it's a tv show. And of course people do enjoy binging TV shows, it's fine on that level, but silly to pretend it's somehow intrinsic to the thing, it'd be like insisting you need to watch the first season of Cheers in one go.

I like the Doblin book better than the Fassbinder I think, understand where bain4z's coming from with "fun, free-wheeling", it's a lot more formally experimental than the show (which only goes that way in the last ep iirc). Be advised though that this playfulness comes within the context of a depressing as fuck Weimar crisis novel.

I think Ali: Fear Eats The Soul would be the Fassbinder to point neophytes to, but I'm not a huge fan so prob wrong.

RE: ways of watching BA - I think Morbs, or someone, quoted Fassbinder as saying he would prefer audiences to watch it straight through, beginning to end. And Tom D very wisely pointing out that Fassbinder never stayed still for 14 hours in his entire life.

Again, I seem to remember reading, possibly on Wiki, that Fassbinder considered the TV series something of a failure and wanted to have another crack at the novel at some point.

I’ve never seen it (or read it) but I watched 8 hours don’t make a day in one long screening at moma - I enjoyed it but I also thought this clearly isn’t meant to be watched this way

It's a curious period where it looked like things were switching over from cinema to TV, with lots of big name directors making multi part shows.

I caught a four part TV drama from the 70s directed by Bergman at the BFI on a Sat afternoon, that's the nearest I've gone to seeing something originally broadcast on TV by an auteur. Otherwise I've seen it in DVDs/Torrents.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_to_Face_(1976_film)

Watched a Gian Maria Volonté interview from 1982 where he keeps trying to guide the convo back onto "how our consumption of images has changed", this tying into the Christ Stopped At Eboli TV mini-series he had just done with Francesco Rosi. Pointing out that a viewer has much more agency with television (changing the colour contrast, muting, recording) and that the amount of images produced in a day are comparable to the amount of images cinema produces in a year. I'm not sure what he was getting at in the end, perhaps just obfuscating because he felt a bit ashamed at doing TV, but who knows?

Home recording made a huge difference! Also having choice of pre-recorded for home viewing---though I still wanted to go to the Film Society screenings at theater in Student Center, plus classroom screenings---pass the word on those---and out-of-town, sometimes out-of state, limited theatrical screenings:get it while you can.

Favorite film books?

As in? Just in general? I’ve always liked The Devil’s Candy, about the filming of Bonfire of the Vanities. You can read an excerpt from it here.

Thanks! Yeah, just in general: collected reviews, essays, by single authors, anthologies, re diff eras, genre/subgenre, also about specific films, actors, directors etc.
I don't know many, but usually enjoyed Kael and Sarris reviews in TNY and VV. Bookwise, Agee on Film is a trip; Manny Farber's Negative Space taught me some more things about writing and thinking about what I've seen and am seeing (he's kind of the counter-Agee, but not anti-); Alfred and I enjoyed Robert Gottleib's life-and-works-and-afterlife-incl.-mentions-and-swag bio-anthology Garbo.

Thanks! Yeah, just in general: collected reviews, essays, by single authors, anthologies, re diff eras, genre/subgenre, also about specific films, actors, directors etc.
I don't know many, but usually enjoyed Kael and Sarris reviews in TNY and VV. Bookwise, Agee on Film is a trip; Manny Farber's Negative Space taught me some more things about writing and thinking about what I've seen and am seeing (he's kind of the counter-Agee, but not anti-); Alfred and I enjoyed Robert Gottleib's life-and-works-and-afterlife-incl.-mentions-and-swag bio-anthology Garbo.

xp: ha, Tom Wolfe and Savonarola! Yeah, thanks for that.

Agh, too many windows open, sorry.

I read The Devil's Candy decades ago--I can recall a large amount of time spent by a unit director trying to prove to DePalma that they could do an interesting shot of a plane landing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No2xc_5zd4I

LOve Saves The Day Tim Lawrence
talking about the development of the discotheque largely in NYC in the early 70s. Ties in with the podcast LOve Is The Message where the author and a companion retrace a lot of the same scene and a few related ones. Pretty good so far.

Restorative Justice Reader Gerry Johnstone (ed)
various key texts on teh subject. I've had this around teh bed for months and need to get through it and return it sine they seem to be tightening the renewal process in teh Irish library system. Quite good so possibly good that I got an incentive to read it. Think I stretched myself in too many different directions to get everything I started trying to read last year so some things I really wanted to read go backburnered too much.
Want to read more on the subject anyway.

DePalma took the correct position. Shots of planes landing can only provide a few seconds of bland filler during a transition between scenes.

Just starting: Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, F

I read it at a friend's rec about five years ago and it impressed me.

xp Great use of a stock shot, which does seem like its around ten seconds: a mighty airliner flying through glorious skies, headed right and West, then flipped left and East when characters are going back thataway yet again, in John Huston's ace gangster comedy Prizzi's Honor.
It's based on a novel of same title, written by Richard Condon, whose best-known work, I guess, was The Manchurian Candidate---is he good? Sees like he might be, judging by Huston's version and usual taste in source material.

Poster Dow, the film book I own that has most surprised people when they see it on the shelf is David Thomson's NICOLE KIDMAN. 'Why do you have a whole book on Nicole Kidman?'

Mark S, an ILX poster, once wrote a book about a film.

Big thread about film books:

Search: Good, nay essential, books about film

Today I would recommend A Long Hard Look at Psycho by Raymond Durgnat

the durgnat is very good yes

(my book is on the other hand very short)

Such great film writing!

And such small portions!

Poster Dow, the film book I own that has most surprised people when they see it on the shelf is David Thomson's NICOLE KIDMAN. 'Why do you have a whole book on Nicole Kidman?'

The question Thomson would ask if he saw this is, "When did I write a whole book on Nicole Kidman?"

Thanks all, incl for reminder about mark s book! Also about that film books thread.
I've never read anything by Thomson that made me want to read more, and that's from anthologies, can't imagine making it through a whole book. Just seems like a solemn slogger.
Think I'll look for a Cahiers du Cinéma collection with Godard etc.

Thomson is pretty much the opposite of a solemn slogger.

More of a rogueish raconteur or mischievous mixer.

dow, it's post-Godard et al, but you can get two volumes of translated Cahiers articles from 68-73 - 'the red years' - as free PDF downloads:

https://monoskop.org/images/7/72/Fairfax_Daniel_The_Red_Years_of_Cahiers_du_cinema_1968-1973_vol_1_2021.pdf

Lots of foundational Marxist-Semiotic-Structuralist film criticism if that's yr thing.

Thomson has flaws, but he's not a slog.

i have a battered copy of the collected 1950s cahiers du cinema (neo-realism, hollywood, new wave, ed.jim hillier) which is useful for historical access to the thoughts of the nouvelle vague before and as they first started making films -- godard on truffaut's 400 coups etc -- tho not in my opinion for terrifically insightful critical writing (basically they were working towards a cinematic reset to allow themselves space to have success at making movies -- which they achieved! but we live in the wake of the reset and as a consequence much of it seems super-obvious). manny farber is a far better writer (and you already have negative space, which i was rereading and enjoying over christmas)

That Durgnat book seems kind of expensive these days, thinking of posting on the appropriate thread for such things.

TS: Termite vs. Elephant

challopsing for team white elephant like there's no tomorrow

I read a chapter or two of Bono's SURRENDER. He describes his wedding in 1982. Adam Clayton was best man. U2 played at the wedding party, presumably quite ramshackle, with guest appearances from other notable musicians like Paul Brady. The honeymoon was in Jamaica. When they arrived the housekeeper said 'Sting, great to see you again!'.

Now reminded of an Alan Clarke film I saw at the same place I went to see Berlin Alexanderplatz, MoMA, only the former didn't require nearly as much sitzfleisch, this being Elephant, which I believe was about The Troubles iirc.

Have mentioned it before on ILX, somewhere, but this is a v well done summary:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1028-a-short-history-of-cahiers-du-cinema

the one i keep hearing recommendations for is, i think, The Zone, which is someone live-blogging Stalker

(googles...)
"Zona: On Andrei Tarkovsky’s 'Stalker' by Geoff Dyer"

some ppl like geoff dyer but i am not one of them

That Dyer book was not bad, but between insights there were too many winky "can you believe I'm writing a book about this super-obscure, super-difficult movie?!?" asides.

I went to see Dyer read from and talk about the book. This was fine. But I have never seen the film.

re 'live-blogging a film', I can recommend Jonathan Lethem's THEY LIVE (2010), except that it contains too many references to Zizek. Otherwise contains some very good material.

Cool, thanks also for all Cahiers tips, and I'll give Thomson another shot the next time he happens by, won't seek him out. Should seek out my copy of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber: says it was purchased in 2013 and never read! Oh well, I've got Negative Space on brane.

Stevolende, you might like the listening companion to Love Saves The Day, though it's even more wide-ranging than I expected from reading the book. A time trip across the dance floor, but I got into most of it pretty quickly. Bandcamp has digital (flac or whatever you want, as usual), CD, vinyl, though I got CDs from Amazon (a 2-disc set; BC seems to have them sep?). Amazon had mp3 and vinyl as well (the vinyl's sometimes sold out on BC). The only free BC stream is Charles Earland's "Leaving This Planet," though there may be more on other sites.
(All of the listening companion for the equally excellent second book, Life & Death On A New York Dance Floor (1980 - 1983), can be heard for free on Bandcamp.)

Cool. Thanks. Podcast is quite good too.
Was going to copy the discography in the book to somewhere.

Will try to get to read the 2nd book.

This copy was apparently in a store for some reason. As soon as I get it it has a request lodged so I need to get through it fast.
Surprised it's in a store and therefore not in usual circulation. Would have thought existence of Podcast would mean some demand.
Podcast is Love Is The Message but author is one of 2 hosts.

Second book better than the first, afaic, and gets into the recuperation of underground music culture into capitalist systems of extraction/exploitation in a way that isn’t didactic.

yeah, I loved Life & Death On A New York Dance Floor

After reading over half of NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS, and 40-50pp of (tiresomely earnest and reverential) metatext by the translator and others, I'm bailing out on that book. But I can affirm that it improves as it goes, and chapter 8 is actually quite sharp on the management of carceral space, and the way that baffling, shifting regulations confuse and dismay prisoners. An odd detail, typical of this, is that the prisoner can receive half a glass of milk, but if the cook mistakenly pours slightly more than half a glass into the glass, then it becomes invalid and is set aside and wasted. Crazy.

I bought Michael Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2023) and have read the first chapter. Readable, enjoyable, and perhaps the prose is a bit better controlled than earlier Bracewell.

xpost the other volume in TL's NYC triology: Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 Romance of first part of that title well-balanced by research, incl. contending POvs, incl. great quotes.

Also expert social mapping, as Frank Kogan might put it.

I was quite impressed by The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. Not sure where I heard about this book, but seems like it deserves to be better known. Ofc there's a voyeuristic aspect to a middle-aged married dude like me reading about the romantic lives of 20-something single women in 1950s NYC, but the book is much tougher and smarter than that synopsis might suggest. Its remarkable how well the book anticipates so many themes that continue to resonate down to the present day. Jaffe sets herself a challenge by weaving together 4 independent stories with 4 main characters (though they all know each other through an office where they worked together), but she needs a big canvas to tell the story she's trying to tell, a story as much about society as it is about individual characters, in which resonances and patterns can accrue between different people's experiences.