For those who love movies and San Francisco, the Balboa Theatre is holding the Reel San Francisco between April 16 and May 11. Everything from Bullitt to Don Siegel’s underrated The Lineup (featuring a fantastic showdown at Sutro Baths with one of the most menacing deliveries of “You’re dead” seen in a noir) to Greed is playing over the next month — with appearances by several local regulars.

I hate announcing this kind of picayune shit, but between a major transition and several other things I have to finish up, nearly all of my time is acounted for until Sunday’s fateful Tanenhaus Brownie Watch.

So feel free to visit some of the fine sites on the left. Meanwhile, up the pipeline:

• My thoughts on the new Nine Inch Nails album.
• At least two more installments of The Neurotic Chronicles (with ambience and sound effects!). Follow our narrator and Wilson as they obtain their pho and continue their journey across the American wasteland.
• More reworking in of the redesign.
• Something involving Charles Dickens.

• Finally, an award not won by Andrea Levy. Katharine Davies, first-time novelist and ex-teacher, has won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award for A Good Voyage, a title which suggests little in the way of surprises, too much in the way of pleasantries, and that has nothing to do with Virginia Woolf’s first novel.
• While the United States is busy with red-blue and purple maps, the UK is more concerned with such valuable information as the most expensive streets and towns in England and Wales. The winner is London’s Earls Terrace, located in Chelsea with an average price of 4.2 million pounds.
• The LBC nabs more momentum through the Associated Press.
• Poet Julia Darling has died of cancer.
• David Kipen takes on Ishiguro.
• Unintentionally sexual comic book covers.

How do you write a novel with a day job? G.D. Gearino has an answer. Wake up at the ungodly hour of 4 AM and write 250 words before the stroke of six. This allows for 1,250 words a week, or a novel in about a year and a half.

Of course, Trollope was there before Gearino, beginning his writing at exactly 5:30 AM until 11 AM.

Then there’s Graham Greene, who stuck with 500 words a day.

But ultimately it’s about being a pragmatic workhorse. Holly Lisle has some good advice on when to know to quit.

Robert A. Caro is known primarily for his ongoing biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (the fourth book is in the works and Caro has been so thorough, that he’s only just begun work on LBJ’s Presidency). He depicts his subjects with a concern for how their actions influenced the downtrodden and frequently pulls no punches. If Caro isn’t the most honest biographer working today, he’s certainly the most refreshingly combative.

With The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, Caro made his reputation. In that Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Caro unapologetically laid assault on how developer Robert Moses planned New York City for the automobile, bombarding it with expressways, showing no humanity in mowing down homes and eviscerating neighborhoods, neglecting public transportation, or even purloining his brother’s inheritance.

I was always curious if Moses ever responded to the book. Well, apparently Moses did.

Moses’ defense is composed mostly of rhetroic and, unsurprisingly, condescending of the layman. He rails against the notion of equal time and even singles out poet William Watson. Moses is very much the advocate of unilaterlaism, suggesting at one point that “Critics are ex post facto prophets who can tell how everything should have been done at a time when they were in diapers, in rompers or invisible.” I was definitely invisible when Caro’s book came out. But if criticism after the fact is a crime, then one has to wonder how humanity maintains its cyclical perspective.