http://www.edrants.com a blog in ever-shifting standing Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:55:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Noah Buschel's The Missing Person (opening in New York today) is, as the title intimates, yet another entry from the Hey, I've Got a Clever Twist! school of filmmaking. Now several clever twists, nestled within a narrative at unpredictable points, are perfectly wonderful. Some American independent filmmakers, such ... http://www.edrants.com/review-the-missing-person-2009/ Rebecca Solnit appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #312. Solnit is most recently the author of A Paradise Built in Hell. Condition of Mr. Segundo: Finding hostility within legitimate clarification. Author: Rebecca Solnit Subjects Discussed: William James's second treatise on pragmatism, the alternative notion which means the same as a preexisting notion, ... http://www.edrants.com/the-bat-segundo-show-rebecca-solnit/ Tonight, the National Book Awards gave every major award to a white man, demonstrating that snubbing women writers isn't limited to Publishers Weekly. Even the honorary awards were given to Dave Eggers and Gore Vidal, proving that even in the 21st century, white men are still capable of winning ... http://www.edrants.com/white-men-sweep-2009-national-book-awards/ 1. The difference between the theatrical and the theoretical mime. -- In the one the performance is palpable, but removed from pragmatic use, so that the mime is widely reviled out of habit, even when his actions beckon a half-hearted attention. Some wish to beat the mime to ... http://www.edrants.com/thoughts-on-the-mime/ http://www.edrants.com/pigeon-impossible/ Ken Ober is dead at 52. For all I know, Ken Ober was a nice guy. I truthfully hadn't even thought about him for more than a decade until people fired the news my way. But since he is dead, his legacy -- limited as it was ... http://www.edrants.com/the-death-of-ken-ober/ After spending several weeks away from Bat Segundo, I'm happy to announce that I've figured out a way to carry on doing the podcast without going insane. There will be five more podcasts released in 2009, with the first new show released on November 20, 2009. This quintet ... http://www.edrants.com/the-return-of-bat-segundo/ I was invited by Josh Glenn to contribute to his marvelous Significant Objects project, which has writers creating stories around objects, thereby enhancing the object's significance with the written word. I was initially sent a list of objects to pick from, but did not look at any them. ... http://www.edrants.com/a-significant-object/ Roland Emmerich's 2012 is slightly better than Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow -- the hack director's two previous opuses involving mass devastation. But that's a bit like saying that imbibing a thimble of urine is better than eating a shit sandwich or employing an embalmed corpse as ... http://www.edrants.com/review-2012-2009/ http://www.edrants.com/the-possibilities-of-small/ The Times's Ben Macintyre has mangled his mind in a senseless shower of his own hysteria. The Internet, he writes, is killing storytelling. I could respond to Mr. Macintyre's foolish article with a vigorous list of items, pointing to such recent projects as Significant Objects, which has featured ... http://www.edrants.com/ben-macintyre-the-latest-sourpuss-to-run-away-from-possibilities/ Headspace hijacked by entirely unanticipated events. A slight reconfiguration of the brain, a sudden impulse to stop here and start there. Whittling down distractions. The very thing keeping so many others mired in pathetic fixations and unhealthy obsessions and desperate gropes at credibility as the whole operation ... http://www.edrants.com/untapped-currency/ This is a quick reminder that Sarah Hall and I will be in conversation tomorrow night (i.e., the evening of the week commonly referred to as Tuesday) at McNally Jackson at 7:00 PM. Since there is a good deal of weather within Hall's most recent novel and weather forms ... http://www.edrants.com/reminder-live-conversation-with-sarah-hall-on-tuesday/ At 5:30 AM, you know who is truly fearless. Early birds shuffle into the guarded lobbies of fitness centers, jutting their chins and sticking their hands into hoodies not for warmth, but for protection against the unpredictable aperture between the end of night and the promising onset of the sun. ... http://www.edrants.com/five-three-oh/ Marjorie Rosen recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #311. Marjorie Rosen is most recently the author of Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All-American Town Into an International Community. Condition of Mr. Segundo: Kicked out of bed. Author: Marjorie Rosen Subjects Discussed: The white and non-Hispanic white majority in Bentonville, Arkansas, numerous houses ... http://www.edrants.com/the-bat-segundo-show-marjorie-rosen/ I don't know if the world really needed a parody of the Twilight books. Stephenie Meyer's acolytes, as cultural observers have opined, are quite fixed in their passions. I've always subscribed to the middle ground version of the "gateway drug" theory. You may not get the kids ... http://www.edrants.com/when-parody-replaces-opportunity/ I used to write in longhand all the time, filling up five-subject notebooks with the predictable angst of a young man in his early twenties and several early starts on stories, plays, and screenplays that I would revise or abandon. Taking notes was once the thing to do. ... http://www.edrants.com/the-benefits-of-notebooks/ A few hours ago, I learned that a notable writer wrote into The New York Post to express his disguised hatred for his ex-girlfriend. Therefore, my audio series -- Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project -- must continue. The following clip represents my dramatic reading of the hate mail ... http://www.edrants.com/hate-mail-dramatic-reading-8/ "It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself." -- Eleanor Roosevelt That's some sensible advice from my favorite First Lady. (Dolley Madison is a close second.) Her other spiffy idea, which is very wise, is that nobody can make you ... http://www.edrants.com/slowdown/ A few days ago, I learned that a former college friend, who had initiated contact with me, had transformed into an incoherent lunatic. My girlfriend has benignly suggested, based on the evidence I have presented to her, that this man was likely a lunatic all along. I'd prefer ... http://www.edrants.com/hate-mail-dramatic-reading-project-7/ http://www.edrants.com/brave-bulging-buoyant-clairvoyants/ The office was ensconced within a vicious slab that prioritized desperate spendthrift tendencies over comfort and efficiency. The man who rented out this thin rectangle on the 33rd floor seemed to believe that the $1,200 he paid each month granted him some illusory status. He took advantage of ... http://www.edrants.com/offices-within-offices/ The Bat Segundo Show may be on temporary hiatus (with several shows still in the backlog). But that doesn't mean that I'm not talking with authors. Sarah Hall, author of How to Paint a Dead Man (the subject of a recent roundtable discussion on these pages), will be ... http://www.edrants.com/live-conversation-with-sarah-hall-november-3-2009/ In 1993, I took a film class and was grouped with an amicable ragtag crew. We filmed little shorts with the Panasonic PV-535, the only consumer VHS camera that had chroma key and that was compulsively used at just about every opportunity. The camera had a little mini-camera ... http://www.edrants.com/scene-from-a-mall-1993/ In the mid-1990s, I made my way around various film and theater circles. My interests were mainly centered around the prospect of putting on a good show. I enjoyed being one of those wizards behind the curtain executing an illusion. And it didn't matter whether it was ... http://www.edrants.com/when-i-had-hair/ http://www.edrants.com/am-i-going-to-be-doing-this-at-fifty/ [The following article is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book, Eating Young Jewish Writers.] When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother's house. She would ask me if I was hungry. And when I would cry, she would tell me that I needed to ... http://www.edrants.com/eating-young-jewish-writers/ http://www.edrants.com/happy-columbo-day/ In all the NYFF madness, I failed to note that my review of Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Darkappeared in Friday's edition of the Chicago Sun-Times. It begins: While the intrepid academic Morris Dickstein has been noodling around on Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (W.W. ... http://www.edrants.com/new-review-26/ A last-minute deadline for a very fun and entirely unanticipated eleventh hour project has cropped up. This development means a break in New York Film Festival coverage. I have quite a number of films that I still have to write about (and not just NYFF offerings), and my ... http://www.edrants.com/coverage-interruptus/