Because, despite today’s spring-like weather, the world still sucks and we wanted to say something mean about someone, we dropped in at the Housing Works Bookstore and Café’, located on Crosby Street, and our faith in humanity was slightly restored. Main floor and mezzanine look more like an eccentric—though literate millionaire’s library. And, just like Barnes and Noble (which, we’re told, is mean to puppies), in the cafe section tables awaited and we read and we ate—knishes, quiche, sandwiches, soup, pastries, cake, coffee, tea, beer, wine, and more.  Best of all, our money went to an organization that gives medical services, housing, and employment to more than 2,500 homeless HIV-positive New Yorkers.

Housing Works Bookstore and Cafe: 130 Crosby Street.

The “true” story chronicles Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). a heroin dealer who adopts the financial wizardry of his Italian mafia peers to run the Harlemites working under him, and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, his arm still aching from throwing telephones at concierges), a cop whose honesty makes him a pariah within the corrupt police community. Even with that handicap, Roberts spends the movie closing in on the bust he needs to put Lucas away.

Not that we care. Director Ridley Scott is so concerned with developing the paradoxes of these two characters (Lucas as a Pablo Escobarian enemy of the state, but a community philanthropist and responsible family-man; Roberts a good cop but a fuck-up at home) that he neglects the plot and, difficult to fathom, character development.

Indeed, his characters are chess pieces—their abilities limited as Scott clumsily tosses foreshadowing and extraneous information into this 157-minute epic, giving the movie an “oh, but first this happened” feel.
Because it’s based on a true story, we’d normally forgive the obligatory car explosion, cop vs. criminal shoot-out, drive-by shooting, bad guy’s suicide via .22 to the mouth; but the whole movie is a cliché. Worst of all, it roots for Denzel’s ruthless,drug-dealing Lucas.

If you want genuine, gritty, ghetto realism, watch Full House re-runs.

– Eric Siegel

I’d seen trees before—so far Connecticut offered nothing I didn’t know from suburban Long Island, or even Staten Island. But the idea of Connecticut was sort of interesting…The traffic tightened as we skirted a small city called Hartford.

Cute, this presumption that Essrog, who. in his 20s or 30s, and has been all over New York City, has never heard of Hartford. Likewise for the other characters in the novel: Gerard, the street-tough-turned Zen master; Kimmery, the naïve Zen novice Essrog boinks; the Polish giant who kills his boss and beats him up; the black detective who is terrified of these Brooklyn low-lifes; and finally Julia, who, we are to believe, grew up in Nantucket and becomes a bleached-blond, tough-talking, boink-everyone-with-an-X-chromosome, Brooklyn moll.

The book, from the narrator’s highly-literate first line (“Context is everything”) to the contrived ending, has been a stupendous marketing success: Lethem won a McCarther “genius” award, and pretention meister Edward Norton is turning it into a movie. We don’t care about any that shit. The book sucks because Essrog is just not believable.

Meanwhile, firefighters, carrying impossible 90-pound loads, perished. The book’s most indelible image is that of a hundred fire fighters, exhausted, resting on the 19th floor of the North Tower. Because of obsolete walkie-talkies, they didn’t know about the South Tower’s collapse.

Here, verbatim, is the scene as court officers Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, who’ve come down from floor 51, reach floor 19, and see the resting firefighters:

Most were sitting, and had stripped off their turnout coats. Helmets off. Some were down to their blue T-shirts, maps of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazoned with the Fire Department shield. Wender saw that some were lying down. Axes resting against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, Wender thought, what we are hearing.

Baccellieri and Moscola took in the scene. They guessed there were at least 100 firefighters on the floor.

“We’re getting out of here,” Baccellieri yelled. “We’ve been told we’ve got to get out of the building.”

No one moved.

Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender survived. All 100 firefighters died. Reason being no one told them that the tower they were in was already leaning and, near the top, buckling.

In spare, eloquent prose, the authors reconstruct these scenes. And unlike the moronic football fans who, in weeks following the attack, painted their faces red, white, blue — as if the post-9/11 trauma were a football pep rally — they never romanticize. They tell the truth: the firefighters, though brave, marched with way too much equipment to their doom. Office workers, like the poor souls who worked for Mizuho, descended to the lobby and were told to go back, where they died. Jumpers leapt to their horrific deaths, not because they were brave, but because the heat was unbearable. The towers, because of design flaws, were ripe for collapse. Most ordinary people, such as Abe Zelmanowitz, who, rather than saving himself, stuck by his quadriplegic friend Ed Beyea, acted with heroic unselfishness. Someone oughta build a statue to these guys.

And someone oughta give Dwyer and Flynn one of those fancy writing awards. They explain, in layman’s terms, the reasons why the buildings collapsed, the unique architecture, the lack of fire-proofing. And over everything they write hangs the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the attack that should have spurred the fire-proofers to work doubly fast; they didn’t. By Sept 11, only 20 floors had been adequately fire-proofed. This appalling ineptness, along with corrupt building codes from the 60s—including bunching elevators and staircases at the buildings’ cores to increase rentable office space—killed thousands.

But what we really loved about Molly Ivins was that she wasn’t afraid to mock. She took to heart the journalistic maxim to comfort the powerless and make the powerful uncomfortable. And, unlike her many wise-cracking, completely unfunny contemporary columnists, her jokes accentuated global horror.

We could give a billion quotes to honor her, but we’ve chosen a few gems on Bush Jr. and Sr., followed by something from her final column:

“Everyone knows the man has no clue, but no one there has the courage to say it. I mean, good gawd, the man is as he always has been: barely adequate.” [on George W. Bush]

“Let me say for the umpteenth time, George W. is not a stupid man. The IQ of his gut, however, is open to debate. In Texas, his gut led him to believe the death penalty has a deterrent effect, even though he acknowledged there was no evidence to support his gut’s feeling. When his gut, or something, causes him to announce that he does not believe in global warming — as though it were a theological proposition — we once again find his gut ruling that evidence is irrelevant. In my opinion, Bush’s gut should not be entrusted with making peace in the Middle East.”

“Last week, I began a sentence by saying, “If Bush had any imagination …” and then I hit myself. Silly me.”

[On then-candidate George W. Bush, in a 2000 book on his "short but happy political life"]

“If, at the end of this short book, you find W. Bush’s political resume a little light, don’t blame us. There’s really not much there. We have been looking for six years.”

[On George W. Bush (and George H. W. Bush)]

“If you think his daddy had trouble with “the vision thing,” wait till you meet this one.”

[Molly Ivins quotes George W. Bush in one of his "Bushisms"]

“What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don’t know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that’s my position.”

[On then-President George H. W. Bush]

“Personally, I think he’s further evidence that the Great Scriptwriter in the sky has an overdeveloped sense of irony.”

(from her last column, January 11, 2007):

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there.”

And, in the interest of fairness, here is a link to a year-old column explaining why she won’t support Hillary Clinton for president.

As Auden said of Yeats: “Earth, receive an honored guest.”

a) it is a Big Important Book

b) it is a bestseller and

c) it came highly recommended by a lot of people.

Think The Kite Runner. And for the first 150 pages or so, we asked ourselves, Why, Recharger, do you read Big Important Books? They all suck. None of these Big Important Writers — Arundhati Roy or Khaled Hosseini or their ilkhood who write semi-historical novels about childhood tragedy — have humor or soul–they’re pretentious prigs, prosy show-offs, and, worse, unbelievable.

Then, after leading us to that abyss into which we’ve thrown a billion crappy books, Ian McEwan pulls us back with a terrifying plot twist: a good, innocent young man with a bright future is falsely accused of rape by a young girl with an overripe imagination. Part 2, the reason we read the book, takes place in France during the British retreat to Dunkirk, and in a London hospital receiving the wounded and dead. It fed the ending, but it wasn’t, as someone said, “the most realistic depiction of war ever.”

It is the final and shortest part of the book, deceptively called “London, 1999″ that sucker-punched us hard. In this blithely, even warmly told denouement, we discover that the book’s elderly author is the young girl who made the false accusations. And what she tells us in her casual-to-the-point-of-cruelty way is too much to bear. It is an indictment not only of the woman telling the tale, but, weirdly, of all writers.

While Dreamgirls has its moments–Eddie Murphy everytime he’s on stage and Jennifer Hudson’s show-stopper “And I am telling you I’m not going,” most of the songs were D.O.A. Take the song “Family,” which the composers wrote while on Methodone. The lyrics are juvenile, simplistic, preachy, like that song a few years back–by Whitney Houston or someone–”Teach the children” or something — it was that bad.

Yeah, the costumes are great, and the first half ever-so-slightly interesting. But when it gets into the corporate Motown stuff, and Beyonce Knowle’s watered-down-to-boring Diana Ross turn, and the absurdly “up” ending, our jaws hit our knees. Plus, we hate that guessing game shit. We totally get that this is about The Supremes. Ergo, the tiny kid doing the moonwalk is Michael Jackson. Can’t you just fucking call him Michael Jackson?

Bottom line, if the music sucks, then the musical sucks. Ok, some may argue that “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” had sucky music, but was still fun. Key word is “fun.” Rocky Horror never took itself seriously. Except for Eddie Murphy, this movie  always takes itself seriously (even to the point of putting in a part about Martin Luther King. If it wanted to comment on the 60s, it should have explored The Temptations “Psychodelic Soul” a great album that, paradoxicallly, dismayed many white fans). It lacks the delirous quality of “Singin’ in the Rain,” (and the dancing), the great music of all those Lerner & Loew and Rogers and Hammerstein vehicles, and we could go on. And Jamie Foxx’s Barry Gordy (we think) is kind of vapid and banal. It’s all so two-dimensional, like a head-achy dream that won’t end. We imagine the fat cat producers hashing out the pre-production details, asking each other: “Yes, it’s boring as hell, but is it boring enough?”

Guys, the answer is yes.

Chandler is about style. Fashion, interiors, language–spare, readable, cynical language. The language of people wounded by life, clinging to particles of self-respect. Those are Chandler’s strengths.

Plot is not his strength. After reading all four stories in the collection, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. I could admire the hell out of the writing, but the writing was so much stronger than plot it ended up distracting me; don’t ask me to tell you what happened.

I do remember a little of the first story—“Pick-up on Noon Street”—because the beginning was cool. Guy tries to pick up a floozy, but she’ll only do him for lots of liquor. He doesn’t have money, so he plots a stick-up. Pete Anglich, alkie (seems as if all of Chandler’s heroes are, um, Problem Drinkers), a sort of retired detective (ditto) ends up killing the guy in a flophouse (with vividly seedy interiors), then gets tricked into picking up a package he shouldn’t. A seedy movie star is involved—or maybe that’s the next story. I get them mixed up. Is this sameness of plot Chandler’s fault or my deteriorating brain’s?The plots do, in the end, neatly tie themselves up, but they are not exactly memorable.

What’s memorable are faces, interiors, clothes—descriptions that make me quiver in disgusted delight. Consider this excerpt from “Smart Aleck Kill”:

Derek Waldon opened the door. He was about forty-five, possibly a little more, and had a lot of powdery gray hair and a handsome, dissipated face that was beginning to go pouchy. He had on a monogrammed lounging robe and a glass full of whisky in his hand. He was a little drunk.

Pleasantly depraved, especially the kicker. Here’s another from the same story:

Dolmers and the girl sat in a small booth with hard seats and looped-back green curtains. There were high partitions between the booths. There was a long bar down the other side of the room and a big jukebox at the end of it.

After reading that, I want a Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of water.

Here, from “Nevada Gas,” is ’a description of Hugo Candless, a big, obnoxious, newly rich bastard getting dressed in his country club locker room, while Dial, his paddleball partner watches:

Candless didn’t answer, didn’t look at him. Dial stood silent with his drink and watched the big man put on monogrammed satin underclothes, purple socks with gray clocks, a monogrammed silk shirt, a suit of tiny black and white checks that made him look as big as a barn.

Maybe not as repulsive as Humpert Humpert throwing on a bathrobe and flouncing downstairs to suckle Lolita’s toes, but still pretty gross. No wonder Candless gets knocked off a few pages later.

Kind of hard to ignore, by the way, that Chandler has a thing for dressing his creeps in monogrammed clothes.

Unfortunately, the racism that makes frequent appearances in Chandler’s world is also hard to ignore. Sure, negroes with rolling eyes and thick lips were stock characters of movies and books, but the caricatures here are painfully dated. The blacks are simple doorman or feeling-their-oats-but-dumb criminals. In other words, big-lipped cartoons. Gangsters and morons—or both. Not that white people are particularly saintly but they come off a little smarter.

So what do we do with Chandler? His blacks are racist props. His plots—at least in these stories—are interchangeable. But his writing is laser-focused on a creepy nighttime Los Angeles where men are weak and appealingly flawed, women are weak and understandably dishonest, a Los Angeles of intense and foreboding reality that Chandler fashioned out of clothes, faces, and décor. Yowza.