(….as soon as the birds leave anyway.)
Guerilla drive-ins are the new best activity:
For three years, cult-movie buffs have been organizing “guerrilla drive-ins” in a number of cities, rigging together a nest of digital projectors, DVD players, and radio transmitters or stereo speakers, spreading the word online, and assembling on parking lots or fields to watch obscure films beneath the stars.
They project the image onto warehouses or bridge pillars, tune their car stereos to a designated FM frequency, and sit back and enjoy the show. The only thing they do not do is ask for permission.
This sounds wonderful. Something must revive the drive-in, not least because it’s the type of viewing that best suits the majority of the big movies Hollywood turns out. You need the easy distractions and odd interface of it, the distance and the other sensory entertainments to make some of these movies, well, watchable. You can eat junk food that makes stadium theater junk food look like soycakes and have a cocktail in your car. Or outside it on a blanket.
Something is missing from our cultural life with the death of the drive-in. I saw Clash of the Titans at our own centerpiece of smalltown life when I was five. When my dad and I went to get extra snacks — (we snuck in sodas and minimal snacks in our trunk; I had no idea when I was a kid that my parents were trying to save money… I thought they were hacking the mainframe) — I got to ask him a question he still remembers with mortification: why was my cousin Anthony on the ground puking near the snack stand? Sometimes boyfriends and girlfriends fight, was the response, and I still remember my cousin’s bleach-blond girlfriend towering over him, playing the conquistador. Would this ever have happened inside a movie theater? I think not.
Just when I got old enough to loiter at the drive-in by myself on weekends, the screen blew over during a thunderstorm. Drive-ins were dying by then, movie theaters switching from showing two movies at a time to six or ten, and it wasn’t worthwhile for the owners to fix it.
Viva la warehouse viewing.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (