Tales of the City!

I decided out of the blue to read Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series a few weeks ago. I was looking for something funny and a little bit lighter to read, and these six books seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Little did I know I'd become totally engrossed in the characters' lives. I lapped these books up so quickly I experienced withdrawal symptoms when I had to take a break from reading them for some reason or another.

Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, the series spans 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco, spanning the time from when casual sex and drug use was acceptable to the mid-1980s, when AIDS was beginning to change the San Francisco landscape drastically for gay and straight residents alike.

The series follows a cast of lovable San Franciscans living at the apartments at 28 Barbary Lane in the Russian Hill neighborhood: Mary Ann, whose arrival in San Francisco sets the plot in motion; Brian, an oversexed neighbor; Mona Ramsey, a whimsical bisexual tenant; Michael, Mona's gay roommate who befriends Mary Ann and Brian; and their lovable pot-smoking landlady, who has a juicy secret of her own, Mrs. Anna Madrigal. 

From this brief glimpse into the series, it would probably seem that these books are absolutely lurid and unforgivably hedonistic. Well, despite their provocative subject manner, the characters all come off as being extraordinarily heartfelt while remaining cautious of not stepping over the line into camp. Rather than following the path of "gay literature" and focusing disproportionately on the gay characters, this series is truly a patchwork of plotlines that give all of the characters a fair amount of room to grow. 

While the first three books are a portrait of carefree life in San Francisco, the final three take a decidedly darker turn. Despite the shift in tone, however, the series is worth sticking with. Though readers may be surprised by the note Maupin chooses to end Sure of You with, the series remains absolutely compelling up to the bitter end. Babycakes, the fourth in the series, is credited as being the first work of fiction to acknowledge the AIDS crisis, and it's a particularly moving book at that.

Tales of the City comes with my full recommendation. The entire series is a pageturner, and, while the writing isn't quite up there with the likes of Hemingway and Dickens, Maupin has some degree of literary aspiration for his earnest (and very funny) tales.

(t0p) Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, (bottom) Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You.

Lauren Bacall me crazy...

"You know how to whistle; don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."

-  To Have and Have Not

Equally good in Key Largo tonight at Bryn Mawr Film Insitute.

I Heart Threadless

Today, I got my weekly email from Threadless.com letting me know which T-shirts they'd be releasing for purchase. I've been on Threadless's email list for quite some time now, because I'm a big fan of the concept behind their T-shirts. Everyday designers submit designs for users to vote on, and the winning submissions are printed in limited quantities for purchase. Each week about six or so T-shirts are released, and once they're sold out of a certain design, there's no way to order the shirt unless enough people vote to reprint the shirt. It's T-shirt fashion at its most democratic.

Often the designs are ironic or clever. Most of them are wordless, though others are exclusively "type tees." Plus, if you send in a picture of yourself wearing one of their T-shirts, they'll give you $1.50 credit toward your next purchase. Neat, eh?

Anyway, one of today's designs caught my eye in particular, an image of a teapot releasing steam, as well as an image of a stately gentleman ("Earl Grey") sipping a cup of tea. The image is in monochromatic hues on a grey T-shirt, and it's called "Earl Grey." How nifty!

Earl Grey

Anyway, this is the fifth shirt I've bought from Threadless. My Threadless collection so far is as follows (click on each for a slightly larger view):

        

Part of what makes shopping at Threadless so horribly addictive is the fact that, if you don't act quickly, the shirt you want may soon be gone! Anyway, I recommend checking out their site. There's at least on T-shirt on there for everyone, I think.

Corinne Bailey Rae!

Last year, I bought Corinne Bailey Rae's debut self-titled album because I liked a song on it called "Put Your Records On." Rae's voice, to me, exudes the wisdom of an "old soul." She's got a unique British soul/R&B style that should appeal to listeners young and old, as it sounds at once fresh and nostalgic. I suggest music fans check out her CD. Favorite songs of mine are "I'd Like To," "Till It Happens To You," and "Trouble Sleeping," though the whole album is great.

NeoOffice to the rescue

Having recently invested in a MacBook as a replacement to my curmudgeonly old HP Pavillion laptop, I was experiencing a euphoria over the Mac interface's ease of use. I'm pretty impressed overall with the Mac OS X operating system and with the Safari web browser, as well as many of the keystroke-saving shortcuts that I probably could have figured out on a PC but come especially easily to the Mac.

Despite all of these positive things, however, there was one thing I was missing most about the PC universe - Microsoft Office. If there's one computer program I'm used to, it's Microsoft Word, and it's the one program that I thought I would need the most, especially considering my student status and the countless number of essays and homework assignments I churn out on a  daily basis during the school year.

Anyway, there is a substitute, and it's called NeoOffice. Available for free download (though a small donation is suggested), it's just as easy to use as office and includes substitutes for all of the familiar applications in Microsoft Office. So, as a heads up, if you're a new Mac user or even if you just want to save on buying Microsoft Office in general, check out this handy dandy program.

"Paris, Je T'Aime," "To Have and Have Not," "A Mighty Heart"

Since I last posted about Waitress and Away From Her, I've seen three more intriguing movies at Bryn Mawr Film Institute, my favorite local place to see films. Though it's regrettable that I don't visit Philadelphia more often (or New York for that matter), Bryn Mawr is a reminder that culture does exist outside of large cities.

First is Paris Je T'Aime, a series of 18 French-language short films, each set in a different arrondissement (subdivided section) of Paris. It's hard to imagine 18 short films working together as a cohesive unit, and this movie isn't really able to disprove that kind of logic. There's no really coherent theme tying the shorts together, besides for the concepts of love and Paris that seem entirely too general.

 

No matter, many of the shorts are effective, witty, or at least visually appealing. Especially charming is the final piece (click to watch the entire section on YouTube), directed by Alexander Payne (Sideways), that tells of a middle-aged American woman's lonely trip to Paris and the bond she forms with the city, one she describes as a love affair in and of itself. The featured actress in that portion is Margo Martindale, an actress who seems to be in an abundance of compelling movies, always in lackluster roles. In this short, you've got to love her bumbag. Many of the pieces are memorable, and it's definitely a film - or, rather, a collection of 18 - that's worth checking out, as much for their artistry as for the quirky, if inconsistent, content.

The second installment of the Hollywood Summer Nights series at BMFI was To Have and Have Not starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Though I was familiar with Bogart's work in Casablanca, I hadn't ever seen Lauren Bacall before, so this film was especially revelatory for that reason. She's got a smoky, brusque quality that's absolutely stunning - the rare case of someone having true star quality. The movie, directed by Howard Hawks, featured a typical formulaic ganster/chase plot, and it was the performances that really stood out. I'm looking forward to seeing Key Largo, also starring Bogart, this coming week.

Last but certainly not least was A Mighty Heart. Having read the Vogue profile of Angelina Jolie last fall, I got a sense that she was not your typical movie star. She prefers to keep to herself, has an overwhelming sense of self and self-responsibility, and, in a way that's in keeping with the outstanding values of this film, a mighty heart that's willing to take in various children from around the world.

I'm not too familiar with Jolie's work overall, but I was suspecting from previews of A Mighty Heart that it would be a good film. I wasn't, however, expecting a movie with quite the impact that this one had. The movie follows the hunt for Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), a Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped in Afghanistan after leaving one night for a particularly smarmy interview. His wife, Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), and a team of officials, gather in a house rented by Pearl's colleague, stake out their territory in what becomes a non-stop, full-force search for any information they can find. It's a riveting movie that follows the twists and turns of the incoming clues as they come and latches onto particularly affecting bits of dialogue between those searching for Pearl and between Daniel and his wife in flashback.

It's one of those movies, like United 93 before it, where you know the harrowing ending but are ultimately unable to turn away from the proceedings. What really made this film stand out was its absolute unwillingness to sensationalize the events portrayed. Jolie's performance is a fine example of a woman inhabiting a role that's absolutely the heart and center of the movie but who is so humbled by the the part she's playing that one never gets the sense that she's manipulating the audience. It's a tour de force for Jolie. 

Though I was very much captivated by the film as a whole, I wished I could have known more about the two characters (Danny Pearl and Mariane Pearl) at its center. I wasn't quite sure why Pearl's heart was so particularly "mighty." In fact, Mariane herself seems to emphasize, particularly through the humility she shows in television interview segments, that Pearl (and herself, and all others for that matters) are part of a global community and that, in many ways, no one man is particularly mightier than any other. Despite that small gripe however, nonetheless, it's a must-see movie.

Jeans Aplenty

With a week left before my birthday, I went jeans shopping with the girls - Christina and Leah - today. It was tons of fun (+ free gelato) and surprisingly easy to find jeans that fit properly.

I'm a skinny, skinny boy for sure. Most normal stores don't carry jeans that really fit well. I'm of the mind that jeans ought to actually fit rather than drape over your body in some saggy, miscalculated way, so I need to go for skinny jeans. Yet, oftentimes, skinny jeans are just too skinny. 

Luckily, I found two pair that were just right:

 

  

From left to right, Levi's 511 rail jeans, BDG skinny blue jeans.

Patti's Turn

I used to hate  Patti LuPone. The very thought of her vocal histrionics made me cringe. In the past, she's had a "unique" way of following musical phrasings that hasn't done much to excite me personally. Her performance as Eva on the original Broadway cast recording of Evita, of course, is Patti at her best, but her career has had its highs and lows.The major thing that turned me away from the Cult of Patti was seeing her on the Sweeney Todd in Concert DVD opposite George Hearn. Squawking like the seagulls her character, Mrs. Lovett, sings about in "By the Sea," this was a performance that irked me to the core.

So how, you ask, does one covert back to Patti-fanaticism? For me, it was a three-step program.

1. I watched her giving a stunning, only mildly overacted performance as Fosca opposite Michael Cerveris's Giorgio and Audra McDonald's Clara in Passion on Live at Lincoln Center, in which she emphasized the aching humanity of her character so incredibly passionately.

2. I listened to tracks from her recent album, The Lady with the Torch, which features a more toned-down sound from La Lupone.

3. I saw her twice on Broadway as Mrs. Lovett in the John Doyle-directed production of Sweeney Todd that was on Broadway the season before this last one. Totally expecting to see a repeat performance of what she'd done on the televised version, she totally reinvented herself and gave one of the fiercest performances by a leading lady in a Broadway show I've yet to witness.

Next up for La LuPone?

Mama Rose in Gypsy at City Center, with Boyd Gaines (revelatory this season in Journey's End) as Herbie and Laura Benanti as Louise. Sounds just about perfect to me. 

Just got my tickets to see it with Emma July 13th. Could I be more excited?

Awaiting "Across the Universe"

After having witnessed some of the filming of Broadway and opera director Julie Taymor's upcoming movie Across the Universe last school year, I had no idea what to expect of the movie. I figured it was some low-budget thing for TV and that it wouldn't amount to much. However, the trailer for the movie, which will be released in theatres this fall, and poster have now been released, and it looks like it's shaping up to be something rather special. I love the poster design with the heart/strawberry thing going on. I even like the rendition of "Hey Jude" in the trailer, though I'm not sure how having characters named after Beatles songs is going to strike me when I see the actual movie. Anyway, it looks intriguing and rather inventive, especially considering it's essentially a filmed jukebox musical.

Check out the trailer here.

A snapshot I took of the filming of the Vietnam protest scene by Washington Square Arch, digitally altered in Adobe Photoshop.

"Falling Man" and Summer Reading

I recently finished reading a novel called Falling Man by Don DeLillo, a popular writer who I'd never before encountered. I'd read some really interesting reviews of the book on Slate and The New York Times Sunday Book Review Online and read the first chapter on The New York Times. I decided to try it out on a whim since I had a coupon for Borders, and I was most certainly not disappointed.

It's a story about September 11th that follows the dual perspectives of a survivor of the attacks who worked in one of the towers, Keith (his story begins on September 11th and proceeds from there), and of one of the terrorists (his story leads up to the September 11th attacks). It would have been easy for an author of less inherent skill to oversentimentalize the attacks. In the collective minds of Americans, September 11th has become a sort of rallying cry for freedom-mongering and rah-rah sentiments, and it's an extraordinary achievement that DeLillo manages to strip the day back to what it was as it was happening - an extraordinarily confusing day full of an indescribable amount of grief and human suffering that has left the world indelibly different and at the same time indescribably the same as before.

Interesting subplots, including one in particular involving the novel's title character, a performance artist who specializes in dangling in formal dress from bridges, scaffolds, and other scary-looking places, and another involving Keith's wife Lianne and the group she runs for Alzheimer's patients involving the chronicling of their thoughts on a variety of democratically decided-upon topics, make this novel something richer and more fulfilling than just another "smoke and ash" chronicle of the events of September 11, 2001.

DeLillo's writing style, which, at times, reminded me of Joan Didion's, is appropriately sparse. Without sounding cold, DeLillo uses particularly cutting language to strip down his prose to the most emotionally intense state possible. It's a short book, coming in at 246 pages, but it packs a wallop that will leave you thinking about the book once its over. Falling Man comes highly recommended. Now I want to check out more of DeLillo's books, perhaps Underworld or White Noise.

Other books I want to read this summer include:

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
and On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.

Hopefully I'll be reporting on more of my summer reading shortly! Right now I'm reading Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.