The lanterns have been trimmed, our log pile has been replenished, and there’s a splendid bottle of red glinting in the firelight. Yep, it’s time for another Seriously Entertaining foray into the best of contemporary writing. The House of SpeakEasy’s next show, No Satisfaction, which hits the City Winery stage on Monday, November 17, aims to provide the exact opposite of what it says on the tin. And we couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Philip Gourevitch, Hooman Majd, Graham Moore, Dan Povenmire and Ruby Wax to help us do so. Join us for more laughs, drama, and intellectual stimulation than you might think possible for a Monday. Tickets here. Philip Gourevitch‘s first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the Rwandan genocide, is a masterpiece of reportage (we reviewed it here). His later books A Cold Case (2001) and The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008) were published to similar acclaim. In this marvellous interview with Paul Holdengräber, he talks about James Brown, Jonah and the Whale, and the ethics of photography. “We often use these words unthinkable, unspeakable, unimaginable,” he says. “They’re supposed to tell us, these are huge subjects… It’s supposed to make them sound […]
Read MoreThe Sherlockian by Graham Moore NY: Twelve, 2010; 368pp Sherlock Holmes, London’s world-famous “consulting detective,” might not have been this popular since his heyday in the late nineteenth century. Robert Downey, Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller are all currently essaying the sleuth onscreen; Ian McKellen waits in the wings with 2015’s intriguing Mr. Holmes. Graham Moore, who’s about to experience his first major cinematic success with the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, starring Cumberbatch, was one of the first out of the gate in this latest round of Holmesmania with his 2010 novel The Sherlockian. A book for the kinda people who’d take pleasure in noting the erroneous reference to The Sign of Four in the New York Times review (The Sign of the Four, Janet Maslin!), it’s both a clever pastiche and a gripping mystery. Moore’s inspiration is the question-mark hanging over the lacunae in Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s real-life papers. Upon his death in 1930, it was discovered that a number of unfinished stories, some letters, and an entire volume of his diary were missing. In The Sherlockian, the key document is the diary, which apparently pertains to the last three months of 1900. This is the period during which, not coincidentally, the writer was toying with the resurrection of his most famous creation, […]
Read MoreHow Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise by Chris Taylor NY: Basic Books, 2014; 488pp Star Wars Episode VII has a title — The Force Awakens — as you can’t have failed to notice if you switched on the internet last week. Great timing, as I spent last week taking suspiciously long lunch breaks to read Chris Taylor’s new history of the series, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books, 2014). Although Taylor is not endorsed by Lucasfilm, the Force is nevertheless strong with him. His fanboy credentials are never in doubt, even as he manages to maintain a decent editorial distance throughout. The book doubles as a partial biography of George Lucas, Star Wars‘ Creator (the biblical proper noun maintained throughout). Taylor takes us from Lucas’s childhood in Modesto, CA, a town which would serve as inspiration for his first big hit, American Graffiti (1973), to the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 and the announcements surrounding Episode VII. Along the way, Taylor makes stops in some of the darker, less explored corners of the Star Wars universe. Here are five things I learned. 1. You can watch Star Wars in Navajo. […]
Read MoreDan Povenmire is perhaps best known as the co-creator of the Disney Channel smash hit Phineas and Ferb. Though born in California, he was raised in Mobile, Alabama, where he discovered the joys of drawing and movie-making. He went to the University of South Alabama and USC School of Cinematic Art before embarking on a busy career as a writer, television director, producer, storyboard artist and actor. He’s worked on some of the biggest animated series of our time, including The Simpsons, Rocko’s Modern Life, SpongeBob SquarePants, Hey Arnold, and Family Guy, for which he was nominated for an Annie in 2005. He’s been nominated for ten Emmys in four different categories, including songwriting and voiceover performance, and won one for his writing. (We profiled Dan at greater length here.) I spoke to Dan this week about Phineas and Ferb‘s genesis and why Bullwinkle Moose would be the ultimate weapon in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Charles Arrowsmith: You and Jeff (“Swampy”) Marsh were pitching Phineas and Ferb on and off from the early 90s until Disney picked it up in 2007. What would a mid-90s Phineas and Ferb have looked like? Has its evolution been affected by the projects you’ve worked on, from The Simpsons onwards? Dan Povenmire: I think Phineas would […]
Read MoreHooman Majd (website | Twitter) is an Iranian-American journalist, commentator, and author. His three books — The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran; The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge; and The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (which we reviewed here) — present a view of Iran that’s at once insider and outsider. Born into a diplomatic family, Hooman has often been to Iran but has spent most of his life in the United States; his work reflects the tension and the correspondences between his two nationalities. Aside from his journalistic and authorial endeavors, he runs a very entertaining — and instructive — style blog called The House of Majd. I spoke to Hooman this week about returning to New York from the year he and his family spent in Tehran, Argo, and the state of US-Iranian relations. Charles Arrowsmith: I loved The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, and particularly the passages about how your wife and son adapted to life in Iran. What was it like to come back? Hooman Majd: Coming back was, to use the old cliché, bittersweet. I mean, we got used to life in Tehran — […]
Read MoreWe Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch NY: Picador, 1999 [first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998]; 356pp This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. In the hundred days that followed the downing of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994, at least eight hundred thousand people, mostly Tutsis, were killed in what the journalist and author Philip Gourevitch has called “the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (Rwanda is a country not much larger than Vermont; to put the numbers in perspective, the population of Vermont is less than seven hundred thousand.) Almost immediately, the genocide was followed by a colossal refugee crisis, as Hutus fearful of a Tutsi retaliation fled to Zaire (as it was then), Uganda, Burundi, and Tanzania. Disease killed thousands. Retributive violence was widespread. The wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo that stretched halfway through the first decade of this century were an indirect consequence of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Next year Gourevitch will publish a follow-up to his landmark 1998 account of the genocide, We Wish To Inform […]
Read Morehttp://youtu.be/w2nVcuwF_0A There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation And school comes along just to end it So the annual problem for our generation Is finding a good way to spend it… So begins every episode of the Disney Channel’s smash hit Phineas and Ferb, which since 2007 has entertained millions of children worldwide. Four seasons, a TV movie, and crossover specials featuring characters from Marvel Comics and Star Wars later, it’s the channel’s longest-running original series. It has a large and devoted following among adults as well as kids — its guest stars over the years have included Malcolm McDowell, Damian Lewis, Sandra Oh, Allison Janney, Ben Stiller, and, surreally, most of the principal cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jake Gyllenhaal and Chaka Khan are fans. Its creators, Jeff “Swampy” Marsh and Dan Povenmire, pitched and re-pitched the show for sixteen years before it was finally picked up; their confidence was evidently well placed. So who are Phineas and Ferb? Phineas Flynn is a tenacious, loquacious, enterprising, triangle-headed little American boy whose mission in life is to ensure that things are never dull. Ferb Fletcher is his rectangle-headed British half-brother (voiced by Thomas Sangster, whom you may remember […]
Read MoreThe Zone of Interest by Martin Amis NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014; 320pp …how did “a sleepy country of poets and dreamers,” and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped — and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? These are the questions that orbit the singularity at the center of twentieth-century history. In his second Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis sketches a few possible answers while acknowledging — in a thoughtful afterword — that we nevertheless “know almost nothing about the why.” In Time’s Arrow (1991), his first foray into this particular zone of interest, the Holocaust is glimpsed obliquely — like the Medusa reflected in Perseus’s shield — through the lens of Amis’s formal fireworks. The action happens in reverse: people spring to life and are packed on trains that take them away from concentration camps; relationships begin with rows and end […]
Read MoreSane New World: A User’s Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind by Ruby Wax NY: Perigee Trade, 2014; 256pp Mindfulness seems to be less a case of mind over matter than mind over emotion. In this entertaining introduction to neuroplasticity, mental illness, and coping with the tricky business of being, Ruby Wax outlines the potential benefits of employing a mindfulness-based approach to life. The Sane New World of the title is the other side of mental illness, the world beyond what can seem insurmountable to the one in four of us who live with recurring emotional difficulties. The secret? You can change your mind. Sane New World is both self-help and a personal account of life with mental illness. Wax is an American comedian who’s had a prolific career in the UK as a stand-up, script editor (for Absolutely Fabulous), interviewer (check out her program on O.J. Simpson) and TV personality. But as she points out in the early pages of her book, her busyness may not have been an entirely good thing. “You could say that multitasking has driven us mad,” she writes; “like having too many windows open on your computer, eventually it will crash.” The need to be so busy is a symptom of […]
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