Mr. Helpful
Thursday, March 27, 2008

Well, it happens tonight. The first reading of our new ongoing series. But let me digress...

A regular routine for me, every Monday and Wednesday night, is to take out the St. Mark's Bookshop trash. I actually like the job, as it gets me out from behind the desk and away from the public for an hour or so. Mind you, there's nothing essentially wrong with the book-buying public, just as, say, there's nothing essentially wrong with water. Yet, if I can stretch the analogy, being in retail in New York City is like falling off a kayak in a quickly-moving river--stopping on the banks once in a while would naturally be a welcome respite from whatever's pleasant about drowning. So, it's nice to go down to our quiet bookstore basement and gather the trash. There's a surprising amount of it that collects, and it makes for a nice workout. The mind wanders in privacy.

We share an elevator with the Sunrise Mart upstairs. When I arrive in the elevator lobby from the basement there's usually a crowd of people waiting to go up to the second floor. At this point the eternal but friendly rivalry kicks in, between people presently working and people presently shopping. So every Monday and Wednesday I brusquely lead them out of the way and ebery Monday and Wednesday they frown and mutter in recognition of the generic authority of one who picks up heavy objects in tight spaces.

Well, last night, for the first time ever, some guy started helping me out. He broke my train of thought, which was most likely in preperation for the reading series, as I had been thinking about it all day. It was weird. Still talking on his cell phone, he sort of picked up one of the bags, dropped it, apologized, and only then said, "Here let me help you." I didn't like this and so was extra brusque with him. "Please, sir, let me handle this," I said, as if I were a cop standing above a double homicide. "Yeah, I'm helping this guy with the trash," said the guy into his cellphone. Eventually, the job was done and the shoppers were on their way up, Mr. Helpful still talking on the phone as the sliding door shut. I tried to give him the stinkeye but he wasn't even looking at me.

Now that I think about it, I want to thank that guy. Not because he helped, because mostly he got in my way and worse, made a routinely private activity public, but because no one ever does anything out of the ordinary in New York. I hope he comes to the reading tonight so I can thank him personally. Actually, that's a lie. I don't like meeting people, can't decide whether I think of this reading series as public or private yet, and I wouldn't recognize him even if he did come. How about this: he annoyed me enough to get me to notice my routine. New York routines are the undoing of most New Yorkers. That was nice of him. So thanks, guy.

The reading starts at 7:30 tonight.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:55 PM, ,


Hee Haw Redux
Friday, March 14, 2008



1) Europe's middle class thinks that America's middle class are a lot of anesthetized, germophobic clean freaks. How much better it must be to be the most hated thing of the modern area when you can point to a worse example, to kill brown people for something poetic like terroir instead of oil. American tourists demand clean, history-free hotels when they travel to the old country, so the claim goes--as if bourgeois European tourists were coming to New York and demanding to stay in the Bronx--and refuse to bend to common realities. So it's not surprising that Michael Haneke thought that Americans were likely to "identify" with the air-brushed, ineffectual, doomed German couple at the heart of his 1997 Funny Games. This did not work out. So he remade the film shot by shot this year and made the couple American. But the sort of Americans who might have gone to see Funny Games--not, generally, the sort of Americans with the means to travel-- were too busy listening to death metal to care. Not that I would expect Micheal Haneke to know that, as he seems to display the cultural instincts of a waterfowl.

2) Micheal Haneke is to European Art Cinema as Hee Haw was to American Country Music. Sure, The Piano Teacher was saved by Isabelle Huppert's performance, the closest an actor in one of Haneke's films has come to actually talking back to him through the means of her performance. And in Cache the marionettes at least had articulation points. The rest of it is Junior Samples popping up in a live-studio cornfield.

3) Micheal Haneke works pretty much exclusively with long-and-medium "objective" shots paired with pore-revealing close-ups. This is especially true of Funny Games. This makes it, at base, a Kubrick movie. The difference with Haneke is that he thinks he's working from the outside. I bet he finds horror movies distasteful.

4) I don't mind a dilettante. No matter your ideological outlook, it's dilettantes that make the world go. It's the dilettantes with pretentions toward icy, cold formality who come across as dimwits. If you took a book at random from Haneke's no-doubt portentious home library, I'll bet you ten euros its spine would make the faintest little snap when you opened it. That's what his movies sound like.

5) Don't go see this fucking movie.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:11 PM, ,


"Orc Holocaust"
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

With Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax created a monster.

I don't even know half of what this guy's talking about, but I love the pure nerd-rage he's emitting. "Being an elf was its own profession in early editions, which is kind of like saying being Chinese is a full-time job." Go get 'em, tiger!

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:10 PM, ,


The Last Wire
Monday, March 10, 2008

My only prediction for The Wire was that McNulty would get caught and, while getting fitted for bracelets, would look back at Lester Freeman with an expression, like, "help me out here," and Freeman would look back at him with an expression, like, "what do you want me to do? Someone's gotta stay out here and do good po-lice work." Which would have gone to show how much these actors could do with their faces.

Well, that didn't happen, and in fact, the knives were pretty much sheathed for this ultimate episode. No one went to jail except Chris. We were uplifted by the killing of Cheese (in order, I guess, that gangsters can congratulate themselves on having a code of haphazard ethics) and by McNulty's refusal to blame the serial killings on the one mentally ill person who steps up for it. What else? This was the worst season of a very good show.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:35 PM, ,


The Reading Series
Wednesday, March 05, 2008

I'm deep in the promotional phase of starting the reading series. The website is up. This is great! I remember this from Chicago, staying up nights, pulling together the fliers for the Danny's series, contactin' authors. This is fun... wearying? No, not yet, just fun. I'm drawing pictures, putting them on flyers.

This is a picture of a wolf eating your birthday presents:



 

 




This is what's left of your IPod afterwards:



 

 




P.S. I asked Bobby Tisdale if, since losing the Rififi location, he'd ever think about reviving Invite Them Up for the St. Mark's Reading Series, not just now, maybe sometime in the future. As in, since you lost your space, why don't you use ours sometime? His answer? He looked at me very amiably and told me that he's a little burned out on Invite Them Up. Good night, sweet prince.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:57 PM, ,