If you are a fan of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, here's bad news for you. Sit down, have a drink, please don't bite my head off when I tell you. OK, here goes: it's being made into a film written, directed, and starring Edward ("Fight Club") Norton as Lionel Essrog, the detective with Tourette's. Oh, yeah, and it's being "loosely adapted," according to Norton's website (which I'm not linking to) to be "set in the 1950s." If you're wondering why that's bad, I mean good, please read my preReview. And while you're there, check out all the new preReviewers: since the site was last plugged here, it got listed on memepool and a bunch of "cool site" indexes and its traffic went up into the stratosphere. It is now the Internet Phenomenon this page always said it was. Joe McKay, the editor, is tooling around Gotham in a Lincoln town car, smoking Te-Amo Toro Lights, and has taken to wearing a pinky ring.
I still haven't finished Lethem's "Great Book," Fortress of Solitude. The idea of revisiting 7th and 8th grade (and summer camp!) with him, even with adult hindsight, is just too grim. The last passage I read, describing a Brooklyn street party where he's the only white kid, rang false somehow, even though the book is based on his own childhood: it read more like pop culture research than something that actually happened to anyone. Let's pray he goes back to writing intellectually suspect fiction and stops believing his own hype about being the "poet of Brooklyn" or whatever.
A book you should read, though, is Takedown, by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century. Cowan is the undercover cop who singlehandedly broke open the Mob-run garbage-hauling cartel that cheated New York businesses for 50 years. Like many people, I believed the spin that it was District Attorney Morgenthau and the out of town corporate criminals at BFI who did the hit--the book is partly to set the record straight. Until Cowan infiltrated the Mafia, at the highest levels, pretending to be an executive with a DUMBO paper recycling company, every building in NY had to pay up to ten times market rates to have their trash hauled away. The book gives an excellent history of how those conditions came about, and is as gripping and amusing as a Sopranos episode in its retelling of Cowan's story. I laughed, I cried, I broke up with my goombah 'cause I couldn't put it down.
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If you are a fan of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, here's bad news for you. Sit down, have a drink, please don't bite my head off when I tell you. OK, here goes: it's being made into a film written, directed, and starring Edward ("Fight Club") Norton as Lionel Essrog, the detective with Tourette's. Oh, yeah, and it's being "loosely adapted," according to Norton's website (which I'm not linking to) to be "set in the 1950s." If you're wondering why that's bad, I mean good, please read my preReview. And while you're there, check out all the new preReviewers: since the site was last plugged here, it got listed on memepool and a bunch of "cool site" indexes and its traffic went up into the stratosphere. It is now the Internet Phenomenon this page always said it was. Joe McKay, the editor, is tooling around Gotham in a Lincoln town car, smoking Te-Amo Toro Lights, and has taken to wearing a pinky ring.
I still haven't finished Lethem's "Great Book," Fortress of Solitude. The idea of revisiting 7th and 8th grade (and summer camp!) with him, even with adult hindsight, is just too grim. The last passage I read, describing a Brooklyn street party where he's the only white kid, rang false somehow, even though the book is based on his own childhood: it read more like pop culture research than something that actually happened to anyone. Let's pray he goes back to writing intellectually suspect fiction and stops believing his own hype about being the "poet of Brooklyn" or whatever.
A book you should read, though, is Takedown, by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century. Cowan is the undercover cop who singlehandedly broke open the Mob-run garbage-hauling cartel that cheated New York businesses for 50 years. Like many people, I believed the spin that it was District Attorney Morgenthau and the out of town corporate criminals at BFI who did the hit--the book is partly to set the record straight. Until Cowan infiltrated the Mafia, at the highest levels, pretending to be an executive with a DUMBO paper recycling company, every building in NY had to pay up to ten times market rates to have their trash hauled away. The book gives an excellent history of how those conditions came about, and is as gripping and amusing as a Sopranos episode in its retelling of Cowan's story. I laughed, I cried, I broke up with my goombah 'cause I couldn't put it down.
- tom moody 3-13-2004 8:20 pm