While you're at highdefdigest.com, check out their review of another New York classic: Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary. The anniversary has also been the occasion for the release of a Ghostbusters videogame made by Atari and featuring the voices of original castmembers Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis. It's set in 1991, two years after the film Ghostbusters II. Apparently the game is a wonderful period piece, and it's available for all major platforms. The Wii version has different graphics from the next-gen editions and looks a lot more cartoony.
Here's a trailer:
Has anybody out there played it?
By the way, if you're in the mood for a Ghostbusters pilgrimmage, the firehouse that serves as the gang's headquarters (until it's destroyed when the Ecto-Containment field is turned off by a creep from the EPA) is still there at 14 North Moore Street.
Meanwhile, don't forget the last words of the film, which go to Hudson's character, Winston: "I love this town!"
Bryan told me the other day that one of our contributors to the Cambridge Companion, the freelance writer and independent scholar Caleb Crain, had self-published a collection of entries from his blog, Steamboats Are Ruining EverythingActually, Caleb would prefer that the book, which is titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay, not be described as "self-published." In a blog entry about the book, he writes: "Let's not call this "self-published," by the way. That has a kind of disreputable sound. It's a chapbook, all right? Why am I doing this? I saw not long ago that someone had published a book of his Twitters, and I felt I was in danger of being behindhand. I am hereby restored to the bleeding edge. Also, now, when the electromagnetic-pulse device is detonated, I will be the only blogger in America with backup. And of course I'm looking forward to kicking back while the cold, hard internet cash at last streams in."
Caleb published the book using Lulu.com. n an interview with The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog, Caleb says (half jokingly): "I think I turned my blog into a book for the same reasons I started a blog in the first place: It was free, I was curious, and, though I knew it to be morally wrong, liberation from the shackles of agents and editors seemed mine, if I was willing to seize it." You can order it from Lulu here, either as a perfect-bound paperback for $14.95 plus shipping or as a PDF for $5.00.
I chose the paperback, because I wanted to check out Lulu's production values. I'll let you know how it looks when it arrives.
On this date in...1893...President Grover Cleveland secretly undergoes surgery aboard a yacht sailing up the East River. The successful operation removes a cancerous growth from his mouth.
1898...New Yorker Teddy Roosevelt and his "Rough Riders" capture San Juan Hill in Cuba in one of the most important battles of the Spanish-American War.
1946..."Oklahoma" becomes the longest-running Broadway musical of its day, with its 1,105th performance.
1948...Straphangers face the first fare hike, as the subway's original five-cent price is jacked up to 10 cents.
1956...A young Elvis Presley appears on the "Steve Allen Show" at NBC Studios, singing "Hound Dog" to a hound.
1970...The nation's most liberal abortion law goes into effect in New York.
2000...Actor Walter Matthau, a product of the Lower East Side, dies at age 79.
The detail about Oklahoma! reminded me that I'd wanted to write an appreciation for Richard Rodgers sometime this week. Sunday was the anniversary of his birth, in Queens, in 1902. Jonathan Schwartz played a special commemorative set during his Sunday Show on WNYC, during which I learned a couple interesting facts. "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," from Oklahoma! (1943), was the first song Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote together; "Edelweiss," from Sound of Music (1959), was their last. Schwartz also claimed that Rodgers is the most performed composer of all time, beating out Mozart and Beethoven.
Sometime last year, looking for the track "Manhattan" on iTunes or Amazon, I ended up purchasing a hefty anthology of tunes Rodgers wrote with his prior lyricist, Lorenz Hart, which I've thoroughly enjoyed having on my iPod. My current favorite from that compilation -- though everything's great -- is a version of "Where Or When," from Babes In Arms (1951), performed by Lena Horne. It's a little brisker than the version recorded here:
For good measure, here's Ray Charles doing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" in 1982; I have another version on a fantastic CD called Standards that was released sometime in the late 90s, though the track had been recorded, I think, in the 70s. This is the song my mother woke us up with every morning. You'd think that would be grounds to hate it, but I absolutely love this song:
Like Jonathan Schwartz, I think it's fair to say Rodgers tunes probably populate my unconscious more than just about anything else -- even more than the Bizet or Grieg or Prokofiev tunes so omnipresent in Warner Bros. cartoons.
Anyway: Richard Rodgers. So there. Sometimes I wish I knew more about the history of Broadway.
Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has declared today to be "Spike Lee Day" in Brooklyn to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Lee's film Do the Right Thing.
Readers of this blog know that Do the Right Thing is one of the staples of the Writing New York course that Bryan and I have been teaching at NYU since 2003. I wrote a couple of posts about the film here this past spring. The first invited readers to compare the openings of Lee's film and the film that serves as its foil in our course, Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979). The second suggests that the film dramatizes a culture of incivility in which cosmopolitan opportunities fail to be realized.
Brian Lehrer did a segment on the film yesterday on his radio show at WNYC. [You can listen to or download a podcast here.] The segment featured two writers from The Root, an online magazine devoted to African American culture and politics. First, senior writer Kai Wright discussed the impact of the movie twenty years ago and the ways in which the problems it dramatized remain problematic today. Then, political reporter Dayo Olopade talked about what the film signifies for Barack and Michelle Obama, who reportedly saw it on their first date.
The Root has a terrific set of articles devoted to the film's anniversary, including a guide to dressing like it's 1989.
To commemorate the anniversary, Universal has just released a Blu-ray edition of the film. The disc features a new 20th-anniversary documentary and a new audio commentary by Spike Lee. (Click here for an online review of the disc at highdefdiscnews.com. My preferred online highdef reviewing site, highdefdigest.com, hasn't published its evaluation yet.) My copy of the new disc hasn't arrived yet, but I suspect that fans or scholars of the film will still want the wonderful Criterion Edition of the film, which is in standard definition. I'll let you know how the two compare in a later post.
As a bonus, here's the Bowery Boys' podcast on Stonewall; this year they added a profile on a pre-Stonewall gay bar called Julius'.
Apparently, Lytle isn't the only one interested in this subject. Here's a call for papers that's just materialized in our inbox:
Whitman & The Beats
April 9-11 2010
St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY
The English and Communication Arts Departments at St. Francis College calls for papers that celebrate the influence of Walt Whitman on Beat writers including but not limited to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.
We seek papers that break new ground in addressing Whitman's presence in the works of Beat writers, the reception of Whitman's poetry by the Beats, and papers which address how the legacy of the Beats, their perspectives of their era and artistic innovations, may be traced to Whitman's influence on American literary culture. Topics may include (but are not limited to) areas of inquiry such as "the road", "gender and sexuality", "mysticism", "religion and spirituality", "America", and "transcendentalism". Examples of possible papers include (but, again, are not limited to)
"The Beats and the Search for Authenticity"
"Forging a New American Language"
"The Spontaneous Yawp: "New" Writing Styles in Whitman and the Beats"
"Cultural Minutia Found in Whitman and the Beats"
"Whitman's and the Beats use of New York City"
"The Beat's (Sub)Consious Rewriting of Whitman"
"Whose America? The Idea of a Nation in Whitman and the Beats"
"Homosexuality in the Beats and Whitman"
"War in Whitman and the Beats"
"Poetry for (and about) the People"
"Autobiographical Influences in the Poetry of Ginsberg and Whitman"
"Not Ready for Prime Time: the "Forgotten" Works of Whitman and the Beats"
"Nationalistic Drum Banging in Whitman and the Beats"
To submit, please send a 500-word abstract to Dr. Ian Maloney at imaloney@stfranciscollege.edu by January 31, 2010. Finished papers should be 8-10 pages, capable of being read in 20 minutes or less. Please note on your abstract your technological needs for your presentation.
Manhattan Melodrama, of course. See last year's post on the film (mentioned also in last Friday's post). Manhattan Melodrama is available from Netflix.
The book that I mentioned in last night's post is In the Shadow of Gotham, the first novel by Stefanie Pintoff, who happens to be a graduate of our doctoral program. Stefanie's dissertation, A Narratology of Detective Fiction, was directed by our colleague Mary Poovey; it examined a range of Victorian novels -- including Lady Audley's Secret, The Woman in White, Bleak House, The Moonstone, Dracula, The Golden
Bowl -- as well as several Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie's most
controversial novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Pintoff argued that these fictions are designed to enable readers to recognize that the concepts that we typically use to construct "narraives about knowing" are in fact highly problematic and to model for readers new epistemological approaches. In their different ways, Pintoff suggested, these narratives experiment with form "to demand that readers become self-conscious about
the epistemological processes by which we construct knowledge."
I suspect that In the Shadow of Gotham puts some of these ideas into practice. The book was the winner of the inaugural Minotaur Books/MWA Best First Crime Novel award, and Pintoff's writing has been compared to that of Caleb Carr. The novel takes as its point of departure the 1904 General Slocum steamship disaster, which I wrote about here last summer in connection with the film Manhattan Melodrama. Pintoff's hero, a policeman named Simon Ziele, loses his fiancee in the disaster and leaves the city for a more pastoral setting in Westchester. But the brutal murder of a young woman who was studying mathematics at Columbia University brings him back and requires him to team up with a brilliant criminologist named Alistair Sinclair. That's because one of Sinclair's subjects turns out to be the prime suspect in the murder ...
On her website, Pintoff describes the appeal of writing about early twentieth-century New York:
Part of the fun I have as a writer researching this series involves delving into the rich history of turn-of-the-century New York. I love poring over old restaurant menus and subway maps, touring historic mansions and reading newspaper archives. What I find fascinating about this time period is its spirit of tremendous energy in the face of rampant change. Simon Ziele's world was influenced by the growing popularity of the telephone and the phonograph, the automobile and the newly-built underground subway--even as his job was shaped by innovative but controversial practices like fingerprinting and early criminal profiling.I'll post again about the novel once I've had a chance to read it. But now I'm off to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen -- hey, my summer class just ended!
