Smart Beard, Smart Name, Very Dumb Guy

Anyone forced to suffer through CNN's coverage of last night's election may have noticed something interesting—Wolf Blitzer is a dim bulb. If that observation isn't convincing enough for you, I go into it in some detail today at Bullett. 

CNN is a funny thing. Ever since MSNBC abandoned the mushy center, transforming itself into a liberal fantasy land, CNN has stood alone at the intersection of cable news and vaguely serious reporting. Because it employs anchors who are more than crackpot ideologues, CNN has won the moral high ground by default. Rather than rise to the occasion and transform themselves into something authoritative and real, the network has floundered. CNN isn’t the New York Times of cable news. It’s something you watch in the airport.

No one embodies this bland style of journalism more than the network’s senior anchor, Wolf Blitzer. A man with a wonderful name, a trustworthy face, and a voice you could follow through a pea-soup fog, he looks every bit the part of a Serious Newsman. But really, he’s a moron.

And so on and so on. Stay out of the snow, kiddies, and enjoy the next four years of Obamination.

The Only Mystery Is Why I Kept Reading

Murder on the Orient Express, which I took out from the library last week in hopes of learning something about how to structure a mystery. (That reminds me—if anyone out there wants to produce an animal murder mystery called Death In The Monkey House, I'm really the guy you should call.)

After finding the first hundred pages delightful, the book turned into a slog, making me so angry that—in my typical breaking news style—I wrote an angry review about an 80 year-old classic. Behold!

I hate cozy mysteries. I don’t care who poisoned Lord Dalrymple, and it doesn’t matter to me how ingeniously Detective Chief Inspector St. John Woolybottom cracks the case. If a mystery contains a map of a manor house or an elaborate timeline of each suspect’s movements before and after the power went out, I will put it aside and reach for a thriller with some teeth. Chandler, Hammett, Crumley, Cain—these are the men I will take to my desert island. Dorothy L. Sayers can stay home and suck an egg.

But something has always appealed to me about Agatha Christie. I read And Then There Were None in middle school, staying up late at night and finding it made me very afraid of the dark. As tedious as clockwork mysteries are, she is regarded as the best, and The Best is always appealing. After years of ragging on manor house mysteries, I’m writing a play that parodies the form, and I’ve found that orchestrating a large cast of characters—giving everyone a motive, an alibi and a secret—is trickier than it looks. What, I wondered, might Christie have to teach me?

Read on, my pretties. Read on.

And because the article concludes with some Pink Panther talk, you'll want a little Clouseau.

Uploaded by Chris Lappas on 2009-09-11.

"Why, Hopsie. You ought to be kept in a cage."

My brain's getting a little bit fried from thinking about the hurricane. I'm doing my best to keep tabs on damaged theaters and to learn everything I can about relief efforts—this, I've found, is much easier than actually helping—but sometimes, a boy needs a break. Yesterday, I let myself think a little about Preston Sturges. It was a welcome relief.

From 1940 to 1944, Preston Sturges made eight films, and at least six were great. I didn’t love Christmas In July , and I haven’t seen The Great Moment, a peculiar-sounding dramedy about the invention of anesthesia. But The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story find a perfect balance between madcap and sentiment, and are among the finest comedies of all time. For what it’s worth, he also wrote and directed a propaganda short, the snappily titled “Safeguarding Military Information,” which you can watch for free online if you are deeply, deeply bored.

Born in Chicago, Sturges was raised on both sides of the Atlantic by a flighty society mother whose best friend was Isadora Duncan—the dancer fondly remembered for having her head pulled off by her own scarf. At sixteen, he began working in the arts, managing his stepfather’s theater into near-oblivion while the older man was busying himself with World War I. After a stint in the air force, Sturges bounced around Broadway, finally writing his first two plays in the late twenties. They flopped hard, but his third effort, the speakeasy comedy Strictly Dishonorable did not. He claimed to have written the play in six days—tying God’s record—and it ran for more than two years.

Ahhh. That's better. Keep reading, or turn off New York 1, put on a movie and let your brain shut up for a while.

The Lady Eve Movie Clip - watch all clips http://j.mp/zRetxT click to subscribe http://j.mp/sNDUs5 Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) flirts with Charles (Henry Fonda), giving him some new nicknames. TM & © Universal (2012) Cast: Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck Director: Preston Sturges MOVIECLIPS YouTube Channel: http://j.mp/vqieFG Join our Facebook page: http://j.mp/tb8OMH Follow us on Twitter: http://j.mp/rZzGsm Buy Movie: http://amzn.to/uJ2qei Producer: Buddy G.

Yesterday Was Halloween, So This Is Topical?

I have a long story about the effect the hurricane has had on theaters around the city coming in a little bit. In the meantime, here is this utterly fluffy, not-at-all-topical interview I did with Otto Penzler, asking about The Big Book of Ghosts.

Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop and all-around pulp fiction buff, is also an accomplished editor. Roughly once a year, he edits a collection of stories for Black Lizard Press. Past volumes include The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and Zombies! Zombies! Zombies. This year, he gives us The Big Book of Ghost Stories, a thousand-page tome packed full of spooks and spectres which is perfect for reading round the campfire—or, for our readers in lower Manhattan, round the flashlight. Bullett emailed Penzler last week to ask him some questions about the genre.

When assembling a collection of this length, how do you keep it focused? Is the theme of ghost stories enough to bind it together, or do you need something more? 

Ghosts, or any of the BIG anthologies I’ve done, is pretty well focused. The book has a huge range, from the Victorian classics to the pulps to the moderns. The one overwhelming element I tried to focus on was that they be readable, well-written, fun (that’s three, but they coelesce into one).

I’m a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s over-the-top Gothic storytelling. Who are some less well-known authors who wrote in a similar vein?

Pulps writers, of which there are many in the book, some of whom are relatively unknown. G.G. Pendarves, Paul Ernst, Henry S. Whiehead, Wyatt Blassingame, Greye La Spina, Henry Rousseau—none of them will ever be accused of being restrained stylistically.

There's more. Oh my yes, there's much more. Well, some more anyway.

Al Pacino, King of Jockstraps

Continuing my streak of breaking thirty year-old, well-reported news, I wrote some things about Cruising for Bullett. That would be Cruising, the 1980 William Friedkin/Al Pacino masterpiece about a leather bar serial killer, which is on Watch Now for the next five days, so really if you're gonna watch it, watch it now. Now now now!

Last week, previews started for the new Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, which has been marketed with a particularly unimaginative bit of stunt casting: putting Al Pacino, who played hotshot Ricky Roma in the 1992 film adaptation, in the role of sadsack Shelly Levene. Because we haven’t seen this new Glengarry yet, and because it’s a grey Friday afternoon, we decided to spend the afternoon with an earlier, less self-conscious version of Alfredo James Pacino. It was a worthwhile experiment, and not just because it was so much more fun than doing real work.

(An aside: Can you measure an actor’s success by how few original plays he appears in on Broadway? Pacino’s last appearance in an original play was in 1969′s Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie?, a drug addict drama the Times called “spasmodically rewarding.” It closed in a month, but Pacino drew good reviews for his portrayal of “a lumbering, drug-sodden psychopath with the mind of a bully and the soul of a poet.” He got famous soon after, and since then has been the kind of bankable Hollywood star who can anchor a big money revival.)

And, of course, there's more! But this is really the best part—the jockstrap-wearing cop whose presence is not explained at all:

The infamous interrogation scene from the notorious 1980 thriller "Cruising" directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino. Believe it or not, it was based off an actual interrogation technique.

It's The Most Bitterful Time Of The Year

Today on Bullett, I celebrate the catastrophic failure that was the New York Yankees postseason. I'm not sure why they keep letting me write about sports on that hip, sexy, fashiony website, but I'm gonna keep doing it once every week or two as long as the gig holds out.

In this column, which I'm actually quite proud of, I explain Mets Day, a holiday that I've been celebrating privately for the last few years. It's the day the Yankees are no longer able to win the World Series. Obviously, it doesn't come around every year, but we've had a good run of them the last couple.

The New York Yankees have finished their season in disgrace, getting swept in four by a Detroit Tigers team that barely scraped its way into October. For weeks now, the Bombers have seemed to be playing with foam bats, and their impotent offense has doomed them to a third successive season without a World Series trophy.

Boo-hoo.

As usual, the New York Post has it dead on. “Dear Yankees!” their front page trumpets. “We don’t date losers!” They sign this little break-up letter, “New Yorkers,” forgetting that millions of New Yorkers who do date losers, who love losers, who are so wrapped up in the joys of losing that the thought of winning year-in, year-out fills them with nauseous dread.

We are called Met fans. And today is our holiday.

Get the rest of it here. And because the embedding on Bullett didn't work, lemme post this amazing video here too. This one goes out to you, Yankee faithful.​

"New York Mets" by Duke of Iron (1965?)

Please Don't Hurt Me, Henry VIII

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​Henry VIII had a lot of wives, a lot of armor, and a lot of gout.

More from Bullett—this'll be a three day a week thing, you realize—this time a short column describing my utter ignorance of popular literature. And unpopular literature, for that matter. Really, if you want my attention, there'd better be a murder, some snappy prose, and a boat or two.

A nerdy pocket of the Internet was abuzz yesterday, as the results came down that Hilary Mantel‘s Bring Up The Bodies had taken home the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The award, given to the best English-language novel written by one of the Queen’s subjects, is notable for its ungainly name and for the fanfare that surrounds it. A Pulitzer winner is given a pat on the back, a fat check, and a huge stack of “Pulitzer!” stickers to put on their paperbacks. But win the Man Booker Prize, the BBC tells us, and £1 million in sales is guaranteed. This is the second time Mantel has bagged the award—her first came in 2009, for Wolf Hall—so it seems her place in the Pantheon—as well as her bank balance—is guaranteed. And so I ask seriously: Why in hell haven’t I heard of her?

Not only am I not illiterate, I consider myself to be the kind of man who keeps up with this sort of thing. I read the arts section of the local paper. I talk to friends about books. I am in possession of a library card. And yet, the name Hilary Mantel never penetrated my brain until yesterday. In my ignorance, I have been happy.

And sadly for the institution of cultural criticism, there's more! 

Interestingly, stage adaptations of the books have already been announced. Perhaps by the time they make it onstage, I'll have shaken my ignorance enough to deliver an informed opinion. I realize it's completely unfair to rag on these books without reading them, but I just can't shake the feeling that they sound terribly dull. Am I wrong? Has anyone out there actually read them? Please comment or tweet and tell me what they're like. I want to learn without reading, and I need y'all to help.