Category — Reviews: Books

Books:
- After Dolores by Sarah Schulman
- Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain

Movies
- Roadhouse
- Magnum Force
- Friends With Money
- Batman

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Woo hoo, have I been getting a lot of reading done lately. I’ve made a point to skip off to bed at a reasonable time, thus having time to actually read more than two pages before going to sleep. Why didn’t I think of this before? Everyone else has books sitting on their bed stands and in movies, the wives are always reading in bed while the husband is out having an affair/killing someone/running the country, and yet the thought of reading prior to sleep never occurred to me until I moved to Toronto. Huh.

So, some assorted reviews for my future reference and for possible use on Stark and my queer book/movie review site, if we ever get that going:

Movies:
- Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
- Paris, je t’aime
- Escape from New York and LA
- Ripley’s Game

Books:
The Devil’s Cup
Two Ends of Sleep
The Glass Cell
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Life has been hectic lately. Work is out of control and, in addition to my regular job, I’ve also been doing some emergency copy writing, which is really fun, but also a crunch in terms of deadlines. I’ve been powering away at my running. I ran over 10K last week, which was exciting and also encouraging, as I registered for a 10K race at the end of July before I had actually hit that distance successfully and was starting to worry that I had hit a plateau and wouldn’t be able to increase my distance in time. I am starting to develop some tightness in my right calf that I’m worried about, though, and I’m hoping that stretching will keep it from becoming a problem before the race.

The article about the Canadian Club project was finally published in Time Out Chicago last week. It made the front page of the site, which was awesome. I’ve sort of reached a bit of a block while thinking about doing an adbusting blog. I just have a million projects going right now, and the thought of working on all of them at once has left me with no choice but to retreat to the couch to read magazines.

But, in exciting news! My parents came to visit and brought me two old cameras they had found while getting ready to move. One is a Cine-Kodak 8mm camera, which is really cool looking, but unfortunately 8mm film is no longer manufactured. And who can afford to process film anyway?

The other is a Voigtlander Brillant which, miracle of miracles, is a medium format camera that uses 120mm film! Stark and I are going to get the lens cleaned and buy some film for it, and hopefully many photographic adventures will be had.

This weekend is Pride, and I’m hoping I’ll get some good shots of the crowds.

Now, on to some general notes on things I’ve seen and read lately. Not really full reviews, but just for my own future reference:

Movies:
- Juno
- Sweeney Todd
- I’m Not There

Books:
- Persepolis I and II
- After Dark
- Cover Me
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I just finished reading Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning by Johnathan Mahler. I was definitely disappointed by this book. I had been looking forward to reading it after seeing pieces of the miniseries on ESPN while roadtripping across the country with my friend Gen. I am not a big baseball fan, but even I found the portions of the series that we caught in our hotel rooms to be gripping entertainment. The splicing together of the Yankees 1977 pennant run with the Son of Sam killings, the blackout, and the bankruptcy of the city was a great concept. ESPN’s use of fantastic stock footage helped bolster the story even more. I find it really sad to say “This book wasn’t as good as a made-for-TV-movie on ESPN,” but that’s exactly what I find myself compelled to utter.
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