Dan Brown’s new book is “the most anticipated book in decades”? Really?
We always had Maclean’s around our house growing up. I remember enjoying the movie and book reviews, and I think I learned a lot about editorial writing from Allan Fotheringham’s back page columns.
These days, the magazine seems to have lost its way. On the one hand it clings to its more serious routes, while on the other it indulges in these woeful, tabloidy covers. What went wrong?
Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:
I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?
Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.
She writes (or co-writes) all her songs, plays guitar, answers to no Svengali, and doesn’t rely on a high-priced corps of studio musicians and producers. She records for an independent label and speaks to a devoted audience in an eccentric, sui generis voice that mixes high-Nashville earnestness with the Esperanto of the foodcourt and the chatroom.
It was that voice that resonated at Madison Square Garden. The concert was a high-tech extravaganza, with video montages and backup dancers, costume changes and an onstage rainstorm. But the music cut through the spectacle. Swift’s vocals have occasionally been wobbly, but at the Garden she sang with punch and confidence. What really shone, though, were the songs themselvesâ€â€the rigorous architecture of hits like “You Belong with Me,” “Should Have Said No,” and “Love Story,” whose melodies arc inexorably towards the payoff of huge sing-along choruses.
Thanks to iLike, I occasionally encounter Swift’s very video-bloggy clips in my news reader. They may be carefully crafted marketing pieces, but they come off as ad hoc and quite genuine. The latest one, for example, shows the singer’s flopping-on-the-bed, girlish excitement about her Country Music Award nominations.
Over the past ten days, I’ve slept in Vancouver, Kamloops, Yoho National Park, Calgary, Edmonton and Fredericton. We stayed in a variety of hotels, and I wanted to quickly share two anecdotes–one of expectations disappointed, and another of expectations exceeded.
In Yoho, we booked in at the Cathedral Mountain Lodge. It’s a fairly fancy spot, with a nice main lodge and great room. The setting is gorgeous, wedged between towering peaks and beside the Kicking Horse River. They rent out cabins, which are neatly appointed in, uh, Canadiana. Think Bay blankets and old snowshoes on the wall.
Our cabin was actually half of a duplex, and so the interior space was disappointingly small. To get a sense of how cramped it was, there wasn’t enough open floor space for me to lie down and do some back exercises. Likewise, there was no view of the river.
As a point of comparison, we paid Long Beach Lodge money for this place. The rooms and cabins at Long Beach Lodge are much bigger, finished to a similar level, and a bunch of them have a killer view of the ocean. So, I went away from Cathedral Mountain Lodge feeling like we overpaid by about $75 a night.
Incidentally, isn’t it weird that you can operate a hotel inside a national park? That happens in the States, too, but it always strikes me as a little odd.
A Happy Customer
On the other hand, I stayed at the (awesomely named) Crowne Plaza Lord Beaverbrook in Fredericton. It was a pleasant if ordinary hotel.
On Saturday night, I noticed a lot of noise coming from a room adjacent to me. Throughout the early evening, I discovered that several rooms next to mine (I was at the end of the hall) were full of boisterous young men. Anticipating a loud evening, I called the front desk and requested a room change. I wasn’t complaining–I just figured it would be way simpler for everybody if they moved me instead of trying to police the dudes next door.
The front desk staff quickly obliged, and upgraded me to an executive suite on the ‘Quiet Floor’ (there’s really a sign by the elevator) for my trouble. I slept peacefully, the guys downstairs had their fun, and the Crowne Plaza gained a happy customer.
Over the past week, we’ve been teaching a series of workshops in the Interior. We had a couple of media people in our sessions–one editor of a small town newspaper, and one veteran TV and radio producer. Both of them spoke about how they disliked the web’s capacity for anonymous comment.
For some reason, anonymity is acceptable — not as the justifiable shield for those who fear retribution if identified, but as a shield for those with other kinds of fears, motives or tendencies. Somewhere early in the game it became a rule instead of an exception to adopt a nickname and speak through it.
The result breaks what we were all taught rightly in school: That part of the bargain in speaking freely is the responsibility to stand up and be counted, and that part of the bargain in being criticized is to at least know who is attacking.
I’ve heard precisely the same concern from other newspaper folks in the past. This shouldn’t be surprising, for a couple of reasons.
First, when a newspaper is going to print a letter to the editor, they typically require (or at least request) validating details like an address or phone number. Second, I’m sure that most reporters have, at one point or another, been the subject of venomous, anonymous criticism. This might encourage some pretty black and white views about online identity.
Kirk is clearly a web-savvy guy, a Level 12 Web Citizen, so I don’t want to lump him in with the other media people to whom I’m referring.
We Trust the People We Know
However, I do want to extend a theory about the other complainants. They were all over forty, making them, in the parlance of demographers, digital immigrants. They never grew up crafting their one or more identities on the web.
They may not, for example, fully grasp that one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online. Over the last decade I’ve come to know and trust several online acquaintances despite never having known their full or real name. If they had, they’d know that there’s no equivalent of “getting their address and phone number” online, and that identities are fluidly built and demolished based on online activity.
I’m not making an argument for unfettered, anonymous comments in online spaces like a newspaper’s website. Mostly, I’m trying to encourage people to think of online identity as a continuum, not an on-off switch. And to point out that as the web gets more social, anonymity becomes less and less effective as a tactic. We trust the people we know, after all.
I was in a bookstore at Pearson Airport today. I was just killing time, and I noticed the usual display of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels with their stark black covers and gothic fonts. Er, hang on. I looked a little closer:
They’re an entirely different set of vampire werewolf novels by Kelley Armstrong. Is it me, or do those books look a little too much like the Twilight covers? Here’s the cover of Eclipse, the third Twilight novel, for comparison:
Right down to the wide kerning (or is that tracking? I never know) on the author’s name, eh? Doesn’t the design of Ms. Armstrong’s book covers seem like an incredibly cynical attempt to trade on Twilight’s success?
Earlier this year, Alliance Films released “Polytechnique “, a French-Canadian movie based on the 1989 Montreal Massacre at the École Polytechnique. Here’s the trailer:
It’s been a busy year, and I’ve been living in indie-film-starved Victoria, but I totally missed this movie. Based on a few reviews and the trailer, I’m sorry to have not seen it in the cinema. Wikipedia indicates that, outside of Quebec, it was released in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Did anybody see it?
Also, is this the first movie about the Montreal Massacre? It’s interesting that it took 20 years to produce–the incident seems like natural fodder for the docudrama treatment. Consider, by contrast, that we’ve already seen a few (several, even?) 9/11 movies.
One other note: Wikipedia says that “there were two versions of the film produced, one in English and one in French.” I wonder what that means. Did they shoot every scene twice?
Looking at the film’s financials, we see the classic problem of telling Canadian stories to Canadians. “Polytechnique” had a $6 million budget, and box office revenue of only $1.6 million. There’s more money to be made in DVD sales and broadcast rights (or whatever they’re called), but the producers are never going to recoup their costs.
