An interview with actor/director Andy Garcia on NPR this evening revealed that they’re making an Ocean’s Thirteen. Can this possibly be a good thing?
Day: May 13, 2006
An interesting aside in Andy Selsberg’s essay “They Want Us to Look” in this month’s Believer:
VHS, unlike celluloid film or vinyl albums, is an unmourned medium. It is hard to imagine a store for cool-cat VHS aficionados opening up in Greenwich Village. Artisans don’t repurpose or pay tribute to videotapes as they do albums, cassette tapes, and film stock. The crackles and flaws of VHS aren’t viewed as signs of authenticity.[3] They are now seen as the charmless objects they are (though in their defense, they are analog and will therefore degrade more gradually than digital media).
3There is little unconditional love for new technology. People admire what the forms can deliver but not the forms themselves. Many express deep affection for their iPods, but this affection expires when a new model arrives.
I’ve only seen two of the films in question (Risky Business and Revenge of the Nerds), and there’s only one remaining on the list that I’d like to see (Fast Times at Ridgemont High). But, still, the rest of the essay is pretty interesting, too.
I wish I got BBC America.
(For Spaced, among a lot of other things.)
…being a completist I started with Consider Phlebas, Banks’ first science fiction novel. This, I now suspect, is a mistake on par with starting to read the Discworld series with The Color of Magic–the talent and the good ideas are there, but they’ve yet to be developed.
A mistake? Really? Because that’s where I started with Terry Pratchett’s series. And despite being told that the later books in the series are far better — and despite currently having trouble remembering enough (or maybe any) of the first book’s plot to get into the second, The Light Fantastic — I genuinely enjoyed it. And I’ve been seriously considering starting with Banks’ Culture series at the beginning — Consider Phlebas.
Has anyone else out there read Ian M. Banks? Would something like Use of Weapons be a better starting point? (It would certainly be easier to find. There seems to be some argument about whether or not Phlebas is actually in print, but Amazon.com comes down squarely on the “not available” end, and I haven’t seen it for sale in any of the bookstores I frequent. So I’m wondering, should I just start with one of the later, possibly better books?
I mean, I am something of a completist myself, but only to a point.