jürgen fauth’s muckworld

For a few days each spring and fall, while the increasingly volatile meteorological pendulum swings from frozen sewer to sweltering garbage heap, New York City enjoys perfect weather. September 11, 2001 was such a day, and so is today — 60 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and an unheard-of ratio of smiles to thrown elbows at the corner of Broadway & Steinway.

So why I am I still inside, blogging? To share a few linkworthy items, along with my ever-evolving muxtape and another lousy short film: whiplash and Mozart, together at last. If you’d like to join us for the season’s first open-air Jever, drop by the Astoria Beergarden later. I’ll be the guy pointing a camera at you.

Also of note:

• I heart Foggy.
• Jammys Lineup: Page will be there to accept Phish’s lifetime achievement award, but can Trey get out of rehab long enough for a reunion? At the official site, you can vote on the awards.
• Sturges Rules: “A chase is better than a chat.”
• Twitter to the Rescue
• Barackula! The most excited I’ve gotten about the elections yet.
• J.K. Rowling tries to make a book disappear. More.

Our mail these days looks like Ray Pride’s, times two, and we’re trying hard to work our way through a ridiculous stack of For Your Consideration screeners before the NYFCO awards meeting next week. It’s the only explanation I have for putting on Oliver Stone’s insufferable September 11 drama. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello act their hearts out, but it’s no use–nothing can save this crushingly sentimental turd. At least United 93 had the good sense not to milk that day for “uplift.”

World Trade Center. Oliver Stone, 2006. *

[tags]oliver stone, film, 1 star, maria bello, nicolas cage, maggie gyllenhaal, michael pena, september 11, nyc, world trade center, schlock, terror, cops[/tags]

Terror porn, every bit as repellent as that other big-budget snuff movie, Passion of the Christ. I thought Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday was terrific, even though it uses the same quasi-documentary style to recreate a real event. Why was Bloody Sunday so much better? Probably because there’s a more solid consensus about what happened, and there was more context, which allowed you to actually draw some conclusions. With United 93, you’re left with nothing but horror and a big fat question mark–why would anybody do this? The movie just fades to black.

And again, the question of fiction vs. non-fiction. If United 93 wasn’t based on a real event, nobody would want to watch it–it’s a lousy story.

United 93, Paul Greengrass, 2006. *

United 93 at Rotten Tomatoes - 90%! Somebody calls it “A fresh and powerful reminder of the day the music died.” Don’t they have the wrong movie?

William Gibson’s seventh since the absolutely essential Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is his first contemporary novel. His trademark disorienting hardboiled cyberpunk style is still in full effect, and perhaps because of his genre-bending ways–or perhaps because the world has caught up with him–Pattern Recognition still feels like sci-fi. There’s the usual streetwise Gibson heroine, utterly confident in her powers of divining bleeding edge culture (so much so that sniffing out the Next Big Thing is her job), and of course she’s on the trail of a major international mystery (this time in form of transporting snippets of footage released anonymously on the Internet)–but despite all that, the book is also about September 11. “Rides on a strong current of melancholy,” GQ blurbed, and that’s exactly right. Everybody’s ranting and raving about Safran Foer and his half-a-million advance, but Gibson shows how you can successfully blend science fiction and thriller tropes with serious takes on globalization, terrorism, marketing, and security into one best-selling whole. Very strong work.

William Gibson Forums
Interview with Gibson on Pattern Recognition
New York Times Review
SF Gate
Washington Post
Village Voice