Friday, February 25, 2011

Next book by a friend I don't want to read

I don't expect Ron Rosenbaum's latest, How the End Begins, to be a fun read, though the author's brilliant wit will no doubt be in evidence now and again.

I do expect it to be profoundly, stomach churningly scary--given that it's an account by one of our finest journalists of the likely road to a nuclear war.

Not a book I want to read, but one I need to. Just hoping it leaves the reader not in total despair but with some insight into what we might do to get off the nuclear road before the end.

authors.simonandschuster.ca/Ron-Rosenbaum/47903494

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Can't wait to watch The Clock. . . .

But for now it's gone, and I didn't have the patience to wait in the cold for an hour or so outside the Paul Cooper Gallery, where it was recently on view. And anyway, even if I'd got in, would have only been willing to devote an hour or two to this marathon of a movie.

The Clock is a 24-hour compilation showing the passage of time in movies, so edited that any time one spies on a dial can reflect the actual time you're watching.

I'm guessing one of these days The Clock will turn up at the Museum of Modern Art, possibly with enough screening segments that one could see the entire movie. I wonder how many folks aside from its creator, Christian Marclay, have seen it all--and whether even he has watched the whole thing straight through.

Which sounds like the way it should be seen, and perhaps will be by some hardy folks once the DVD is out, allowing pauses for bathroom breaks during Clock-watching marathon slumber parties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/design/04marclay.html