The riveting film, The Artist and the Model (L’Artiste et son Modèle) from Spain’s leading director, Fernando Trueba, focuses on a series of “one seconds” in the life of French sculptor Marc Cross.
The film director transfers himself into his protagonist, played brilliantly by Jean Rochefort, to explore what serves as inspiration for an artist. “An idea,” says the sculptor as he shares with his young model a sketch made by Rembrandt of a child’s first walking steps. “It is the tenderness of the sketch,“ the “one second of an idea,” that Marc Cross searches for to unblock his aging loss of creativity.
And it is the sculptor’s wife, played by beautiful Claudia Cardinale, who will find this “idea” for him. She will save him, help him create.
In one second, the “good wife” sees a driftless girl in their town, sleeping on the ground at a doorstep. She knows nothing about this vagabond who has found her way to their small French village at the Pyrenees’ border with Spain. The only thing the wife knows is that this homeless, hungry girl, wrapped in a bulky, woolen coat, has a face and body that her husband would love to sculpt. This street urchin could become his inspiration. Claudia Cardinale brings the girl home, shelters and feeds her, and teaches Mercè (Aïda Folch) how to pose.
After weeks of sketches and small sculptures, in one second, by chance, the sculptor sees his model in a new position, resting. It is the angle of her arm, the tilt of her head, her leaning down to reflect that gives him “his idea.” He sees in one second before him, a girl who has become a beautiful woman. Marc Cross realizes his model is thinking of the War, worrying about the people she has been transporting secretly during the night to both sides of the Pyrenees. They are “Jews, Resistance, anyone,” who want to escape German-occupied France of 1943-44, as well as from Franco’s military dictatorship of Spain.
In that one second, the sculptor feels her sensitivity, her attempts to do what is right. He sees her in a different light and feels her soul. She has become more than a body or model. He feels in one second that she is Beauty, Art. It is what the artist has been searching for. With tenderness and love, he sculpts his final masterpiece.
When his work is coming to an end, so is the War. The girl leaves to model for another, perhaps Matisse in Nice, as she bikes to the Riviera with a letter of introduction. At this time, the sculptor’s wife leaves him for a few days to care for her sick sister. It is not a coincidence that this is his moment, his one second, to create the most courageous act of all. And he does, with the beautiful finished sculpture of the woman in his garden — surrounded by perfect light and birds chirping – giving him peace.
The Artist and the Model speaks to an age when all men and women search for one second of Hope.
Headline image credit: Still of Jean Rochefort and Aida Folch in The Artist and the Model (2012). © 2013 – Cohen Media Group via IMDB
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Film is a powerful tool for teaching international criminal law and increasing public awareness and sensitivity about the underlying crimes. Roberta Seret, President and Founder of the NGO at the United Nations, International Cinema Education, has identified four films relevant to the broader purposes and values of international criminal justice and over the coming weeks she will write a short piece explaining the connections as part of a mini-series. This is the final one, following The Act of Killing, Hannah Arendt, and The Lady.
By Roberta Seret
One can say that Dr. Josef Mengele was the first survivor of Auschwitz, for he slipped away undetected in the middle of the night on 17 January 1945, several days before the concentration camp was liberated. Weeks later, he continued his escape despite being detained in two different Prisoner of War detention camps.
He made his way to Rome, a sanctuary for Nazi war criminals, where he obtained a new passport from Vatican officials. Continuing to Genoa with the help of the International Red Cross and a Fascist network, he embarked on the North King ship in 1949 to Buenos Aires under the alias of Helmut Gregor.
President Juan Peron had 10,000 blank Argentine passports for the highest Nazi bidders. Buenos Aires became their home; there Mengele lived, respected and comfortable, until 1960 when Eichmann was kidnapped by the Mossad just streets away. Afraid he’d be next, Mengele decided it would be safer for him in Paraguay with the support of the pro-Nazi dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. He stayed in Asunción for one year.
The Argentine film, The German Doctor (2014), takes us in media res to 1960 Patagonia and Bariloche, a beautiful mountain oasis in the Andes that reminds Mengele of “home.” This fictional addition to his biography, serves as a six-month stopover before he escapes to Paraguay.
Lucia Puenzo, Argentine filmmaker, has adapted her own novel, Wakolda, for the screen. She adroitly mixes fiction with history and truth with imagination in a tight, tense-filled interpretation that keeps us mesmerized. Yet, as we watch the scenes unfold, we wonder which ones are based on fact and how far should poetic justice substitute for historical accuracy.
The director takes advantage of our “collective conscience” of morality and memory regarding the identity of Dr. Mengele. Despite not once hearing his name, we know who he is, although the characters do not. The director uses our associating him with evil to enhance tension and catapult plot – a clever device that works well.
What is biographically accurate in the film is that Mengele continues his experiments on human beings in order to create the perfect race. The director uses this premise, then extrapolates to fiction and sets the stage with a family that Mengele befriends. The doctor sees an opportunity to experiment with charming Lilith, the under-developed twelve-year-old and injects into her stomach growth hormones that work for cattle. He also gives “vitamins” to the girl’s pregnant mother, Eva, once he realizes she is carrying twins. When the babies are born, he continues his experiments by putting sugar in the formula for the weaker of the two. As the infant cries dying and Mengele studies the reaction, we shudder that the Angel of Death has once again achieved Evil.
The experiments on people that Mengele is obsessed with in the film, is a continuation of his sadistic work at Auschwitz with pregnant women, twins, and genetics. His lab experiment on a mother who had just given birth was notorious. He taped her lactating breasts while taking notes on how long the infant would cry without receiving her milk. When he left for dinner, the distraught mother desperately found morphine for her dying baby.
Mengele was also known to inject dye into the iris of prisoners’ eyes (without anesthesia) to see if he could change the brown to an Aryan blue. He documented his results by pinning each eyeball to a wooden board.
And there were more experiments on thousands of human beings.
Josef Mengele, from 1943-45, appeared each day at Auschwitz’s train station for Selektion. Wearing white gloves, polished high black boots, and carrying a stick, his evil hand pointed Left and Right to order more than 400,000 souls to leave this world through chimneys as ashes. His crimes against humanity can never be forgotten.
After living more than 30 years undetected in South America, Mengele died in 1979 of a heart attack while swimming in the warm waters near São Paulo. This peaceful death for such a monster reinforces his ultimate crime. Film director, Lucia Puenzo, would have been well-inspired to have finished The German Doctor with this horrific and true scene.
Roberta Seret is the President and Founder of International Cinema Education, an NGO based at the United Nations. Roberta is the Director of Professional English at the United Nations with the United Nations Hospitality Committee where she teaches English language, literature and business to diplomats. In the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Roberta has written a longer ‘roadmap’ to Margarethe von Trotta’s film on Hannah Arendt. To learn more about this new subsection for reviewers or literature, film, art projects or installations, read her extension at the end of this editorial.
The Journal of International Criminal Justice aims to promote a profound collective reflection on the new problems facing international law. Established by a group of distinguished criminal lawyers and international lawyers, the journal addresses the major problems of justice from the angle of law, jurisprudence, criminology, penal philosophy, and the history of international judicial institutions.
Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.
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by Ivan Raykoff
“Play one wrong note and you die!” The recently-released feature film Grand Piano, directed by Eugenio Mira and starring Elijah Wood, is an artsy and rather convoluted thriller about classical music and murder. Wood plays a concert pianist plagued by an overwhelming case of stage fright; it doesn’t help that there’s a sniper in the audience threatening to assassinate both him and his glamorous wife if he misses a single note in the “unplayable” composition that has proven to be his undoing before. Looking past the silly plot, however, it’s revealing to see how this movie plays into a number of persistent popular culture tropes around Romantic pianism. It’s even possible to read the story as a parable about the pressures of a performing career in the world of classical music today.
First consider the grand piano itself as portrayed in the film’s evocative opening credits. The camera takes us deep into this menacing mechanical contraption of piano keys, metal strings, tuning pins, and tiny gears turning like clockwork while the accompanying music thuds, slithers, and slashes with ominous import. Wait, grand pianos don’t have tiny gears turning inside. This must be quite an unusual piano, as the first scene of the film clarifies.
Grand Piano stars Elijah Wood as a concert pianist contending with both stage fright and a sniper in the audience. Image: Elijah Wood in Grand Piano, a Magnet Release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures via Magnet Releasing.
We see moving guys in a creepy old mansion rolling this instrument out of storage while the thunder rumbles overhead on a blustery overcast day. There’s always been something mysterious about grand pianos, since the large black coffin-like case hides the mechanics inside from the listener’s view as the pianist plays on one side of it. There’s some kind of ghost in the machine of the Romantic pianist’s intriguing instrument.
There’s also the ghost of the pianist’s deceased mentor, Godureaux, the eccentric teacher who had composed that unplayable composition and designed that mysterious instrument. He stares out from large posters in the lobby looking like a cross between Rachmaninoff and Rasputin. “La Cinquette” is the title of his notoriously difficult and “terrifying” piece that has something especially problematic about its last four bars. Maybe the title refers to the fact that it is Godureaux’s op. 5, or that it requires “five little” fingers of each hand to play it to perfection. (The film’s closing credits scroll over an unexpected delight: the song “Ten Happy Little Fingers” from the 1953 film musical The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, written by Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. Displeasure over wrong notes begins quite early in the young pianist’s career.) Fortunately our hero-virtuoso is equipped with “the fastest, most agile fingers of any pianist alive,” indeed there are only “a few people who can play it, who can move their fingers that fast and spread them that wide.”
Fingers take on symbolic meanings around the male virtuoso pianist; these appendages have frequently been represented in popular culture as signifiers of a muscular technique and masculinity. “You need to ease up!” the sniper instructs our hero as he begins to play that challenging piece. “You’re going to tire out your fingers!” Indeed, this performance is framed as our hero’s opportunity not only to redeem his career, but his identity as well: “I’m offering you the chance to become your own man again.” Elijah Wood’s wide-eyed stare easily conveys the crisis of masculinity implied by the pianist’s uncertainty over his playing technique, while his body language conveys a nervousness and an impotence (see his scared-stiff kiss with his wife at intermission) that also reflect these familiar tropes.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Wood has spoken publicly about the off-screen technical challenges of making this film. At a discussion session at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he described his own skills on the instrument remembered from piano lessons when he was young, but also how he worked with pianist Mariam Nazarian in Los Angeles for three weeks to learn to make it look like he knew how to play; in Barcelona he worked with the hand double for this film (the credits list Toni Costa as hand double, and John Lenehan as the soundtrack recording pianist). Wood recalls practicing first on a real piano (“the sound helped me to know if I was on the right track”) and then filming to the recording on a dummy piano, which made it possible to act out his gestures without worrying if he were hitting all the correct notes. It was also useful for Wood to watch a video of the real pianist’s hands from the pianist’s point-of-view, then to imitate what he saw as he watched his own hands on the keyboard. Some critics have noted the impressive “hand-synching” in this film production (see Eric Snider’s write-up) and the actor’s learning curve with this playback technique (see Clark Collis’ interview). One of the movie’s selling points, in fact, is our persistent fascination with virtuoso technique (see Harleigh Foutch’s interview): “So the main thing I walked away from this movie thinking was how damn difficult this part must have been for you.”
Serious pianists and pianophiles will probably roll their eyes over the inane plot and the unrealistic playing scenes in this movie. Which concertos have tutti sections so long that the pianist can run off-stage so often for urgent business? Why wouldn’t the professional pianist play from memory? Perhaps there ought to be a law against texting while playing! The moral of the story might be about that perfectionism we’ve come to expect in this era of note-perfect recordings. “I want you to play the most flawless concert of your life,” the sniper exhorts the virtuoso. “Just consider me the voice in your head telling you that good is not good enough tonight.” The conductor tries to comfort the anxious pianist by saying about the audience, “If you’re going to play music this dense, you’re going to hit a wrong note, and they won’t know. They never do.” The critics-as-snipers might notice and mark down your technique, but the real crisis is the Romantic pianist’s musical reproducibility. As the conductor points out, “you make your living playing stuff other people write.” The concert virtuoso has become “a genius puppet,” as he puts it, a technological wonder that stays close enough to the notes of the score and just far enough from the great recordings to sound like a unique epitome of a time-honored tradition. “Do you really want to be the thousandth guy to give me a respectable Bach,” the conductor asks, “‘cause you can keep that. I don’t need respectable.” This pianist saves his life by literally changing the score.
Ivan Raykoff is Associate Professor of Music in the interdisciplinary arts program at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts in New York. He is author of Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist.
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Hachiko: A Dog's Story on IMDbRelease Date: June 13, 2009
Director: Lasse Hallström
Writers: Stephen P. Lindsey (screenplay), Kaneto Shindô (motion picture "Hachiko monogatari")
Stars: Richard Gere, Joan Allen and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Plot Summary:In Bedridge, Professor Parker Wilson (Gere) finds an abandoned dog at the train station and takes it home with the intention of returning the animal to its owner. He finds that the dog is an Akita and names it Hachiko. However, nobody claims the dog so his family decides to keep Hachi.
Every day, Hachi walks to the train station with his master, and stays there, waiting for him to return.
Professor and dog form a very strong bond, so strong that when something happens to Prof. Wilson at his workplace, Hachi still waits for him at the station, not understanding why he isn't coming home.
My Opinion:
You may be wondering, "What is a Film Review doing in a Book Blog?" Well, I couldn't not talk about this, after just having seen it.
You may have heard of Hachiko's story, or you may not. This is for those of you who haven't:
In 1924, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo took in Hachikō as a pet. During his owner's life Hachikō greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno did not return. The professor had suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage and died, never returning to the train station where Hachikō was waiting. Every day for the next nine years the golden brown Akita waited at Shibuya station.
Hachikō was given away after his master's death, but he routinely escaped, returning again and again to his old home. Eventually, Hachikō apparently realized that Professor Ueno no longer lived at the house. So he went to look for his master at the train station where he had accompanied him so many times before. Each day, Hachikō waited for the return of his owner.
The permanent fixture at the train station that was Hachikō attracted the attention of other commuters. Many of the people who frequented the Shibuya train station had seen Hachikō and Professor Ueno together each day. They brought Hachikō treats and food to nourish him during his wait.
This continued for nine years with Hachikō appearing precisely when the train was due at the station.
In the end, he got ill, and passed away. His body was found in a street in Shibuya.
I've recently started learning Japanese, I like learning languages, and I thought Japanese would be fun to try. That's how I came upon Hachi's story.
Hachi means "eight" in Japanese, and it's a number of good fortune
Slate's XX Factor on the realease of the Where the Wild Things Are movie.
Part of me is in agreement with the XX Factor posting. But then, part of me is really excited to see how this experiment turns out. There are many children's book that I never want to see translated to film. That's one reason I still haven't seen Bridge to Terabithia. I'm not sure why I'm cautiously at peace with CGI Wild Things. But that's the best way to describe it for now.
What's with the stop-motion animation? We should see a stop-motion movie version of Coraline in February of 2009 followed by Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox in November.
Inkheart will be in theaters in January of '09 (How long has it been since Brendan Fraser has been in a good movie?) and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is set for March. Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is slated to be out in October. I'm cautiously excited.
And Tim Burton's taking on Alice in Wonderland sometime in 2010. Even though I didn't care for his vision of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I actually think this might work well. Burton does love those repressed characters and so, in some ways, may be perfect for Alice.
Oh and I almost forgot (how could I?!) about the big one. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was delayed until July of 2009. Sigh.
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By: Alia in Wonderland,
on 11/23/2008
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And there's a pretty good review of it up on Slate.
My own issues with the characters and writing aside, I can see why Twilight is such an appealing story. And the story only really appeals because its about vampires. If Bella has been right on her first guess, if Edward were a superhero bitten by a radioactive spider rather than a vamp who's always fighting the urge to bite, there probably wouldn't be nearly as many teenage girls swooning over the books. No Edward has to be a vamp because vampires are very much a metaphor for sex. Being around Edward is risky for Bella because he might hurt her or kill her or more dangerously turn her into a vampire which would (as Edward seems most concerned about) derail the trajectory of her life and deny her the rites of passages (prom, college) that he thinks she should have. Hm, sounds like a teen pregnancy to me. So I think whats really appealing to the girls that rabidly love Edward is the idea of a guy who is willing to forgo his own desire in order to keep the girl safe. Which is why Twilight is at its best when Edward really does seem to want to kill Bella. Once he assumes the role of protector as he has by the end of the book, eh then he get's kind of boring.
I'm sitting here watching the Today show and since the Twilight movie is bringing back the mall mob scene, they have Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart on. Of course Meredith drags them out to talk to their adoring fan who are all screaming about how they love Edward Cullen and asking stupid questions like "How similar are you to the moody teenage vampire love-god you play?" But the best part was when they asked the girls why they liked Edward so much. I love how Pattinson jumped right in one poor girls face pressing her for an answer. He was all yeah but what exactly to you like about him anyway? And the girl couldn't come up with an answer. Finally kinda shrugging and saying she didn't know.
What she should have said: Not his stupid hair!
I caught a bit of The Seeker: The Dark is Rising on TV last night after Valeska and I watched Atonement. I only saw a few minutes and most of the time it was on I was explaining to Valeska why the movie is nothing at all like the books. It seemed like such a bland, generic movie, I couldn't get into it at all. But at least that led to me recommending the books for her nephew.
Oh and yes Atonement was good but Keira Knightley drives me nuts. I feel like her acting consists of straining her neck and gulping down air. Too bad too, because she always has these great roles. Though maybe she could have made a good Bella since she's so good at looking distressed. Oh well.
Hey, I'm pretty sure I've seen every episode multiple times. But this is just sort of disturbing.
I mean wasn't the fact that these women were no longer in their twenties the drive behind the show? Eh, I guess not?
I'm still planning on renting the movie.
Chuck Palahniuk's book Choke has been made into a movie and it comes out Sep. 26th. I've read all of Palahniuk's books except, oddly enough, for Fight Club (but I did see the movie) and though I like them well enough, I find it easy to tire of the whole transcendence through the grotesque. But Choke is one of my favorites. It has one of the funniest, sickest scenes I've ever read. A scene which I really hope they didn't cut out in the movie, but I'm guessing they probably did.
So I am reading the Midnight Sun Commentary over at Occupation Girl (If you don't mind spoilers read it! It's great for inducing fits of "I'm glad I haven't had cofee yet this morning because I'm sure I'd snarf it all over my keyboard" laughter.) and while on her blog I came across this quote from Robert Pattinson about playing Edward Cullen.
"When you read the book," says Pattinson, looking appropriately pallid and interesting even without makeup, "it's like, 'Edward Cullen was so beautiful I creamed myself.' I mean, every line is like that. He's the most ridiculous person who's so amazing at everything. I think a lot of actors tried to play that aspect. I just couldn't do that. And the more I read the script, the more I hated this guy, so that's how I played him, as a manic-depressive who hates himself. Plus, he's a 108-year-old virgin so he's obviously got some issues there."
1. Pics of the cast from the Twilight movie are up on Stephanie Meyer's website. I'm sorry but looking at those pictures made me giggle. For some reason, reading about a family of sparkling vampires is much less silly than looking at pictures of them.
2. Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom I have found my dream house. Check out the staircase/bookcase. Yum.
3. In local news the penguins are starting trouble again. But at least they have people standing up for them though. School Board Vice Chairman John Stevens said in a written statement “Parents determine what is appropriate for their own children and how to guide their children as they learn and grow,” and that “The schools should not be an instrument of censorship."
Ah. So there are some sane people on school boards!
4. I just finished reading Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin and Extras by Scott Westerfeld. Loved Memoirs. Didn't care for Extras. Zevin writes teenagers really well and Memoirs reminded a lot of the Jessica Darling series by Megan McCaffrey. Extras was a whole lot of superficial characters riding around on hover boards. It was like one very long Quiddich match. I know some kids like that sort of thing but I was never that kind of reader.
Starting on January 13, PBS's Masterpiece Theatre will broadcast all six of Jane Austen novels, including four new adaptations and a biopic!
I'm a bit facinated by the way Jane Austen flares in popularity every few years, usually because of some new movie based on her work. Back in the highschool days, I remember being inspired to to read Emma after watching Clueless.
Sneak Peek Here.
Not sure what I think of this yet. I have read Coraline so many times that I have a clear picture in my head of what the story should look like and I know I should probably stay away from the movie. BUT... I know I won't be able to stay away. I hope that at the very least I feel the way I felt about The Golden Compass movie, which was that it was a fun movie to watch.
Speaking of movies, I saw Sweeny Todd yesterday as part of our "Jewish Christmas" which also included latkas for breakfast and chinese food for dinner. It was great gorey fun and now I've been singing about the worst pies in london all day!
I saw the movie of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass last night. It's been getting some pretty terrible reviews with most critics complaining that it waters down the complexity of Pullman's books. And yes, the movie falls short of the brilliance of the book but that is almost always the case. Which is why I feel the need to speak up in this movie's defense.
I remember reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, of which The Golden Compass is the first book, in college and marveling at how complicated the plot was. So, when I heard that they were making the Golden Compass into a movie I didn't really expect that they would be able to pack in everything from the book. Even ending the film about three chapters early (which was annoying to me as a reader but understandable as a movie viewer), there's just too much.
But really what I'm getting at is that if I wanted to have the perfect experience of The Golden Compass I would read the book again. Nothing is going to match that. But I think that the filmmakers tried hard to stay faithful to the story. And though it wasn't perfection, I enjoyed sitting through their effort.
The Benjamin Franklin Award Finalists 2007; Wands and Worlds has the children's lit finalists, complete with handy Amazon links to find out more info about the book.
And now once again I'm using my own post to veer off on a tangent; the Amazon links issue. As anyone reading the blog knows, I link to Amazon both within reviews and on the sidebar and am an Amazon Affiliate. Why?
In no particular order:
-- cool techie stuff! You may hate it, but I really like the bit that zooms up and contains all the information on the book.
-- using the cover image. There is no definite law on whether or not use of a book or DVD cover is allowable under copyright; seriously, whatever page you link to in my comments saying it is OK is an interpretation of current copyright law. So, for my own peace of mind in not having to worry about it publisher by publisher, book by book, artist by artist, I figure if I'm an Amazon Associate I have the right to use the cover art on my site. This is the solution that works for me; you do the one that works for you. Apples, oranges, six of one, half a dozen of the other. Long time readers may remember how for a while I solved this dilemma by not using cover images at all.
-- my readers are grown-ups. No, seriously. I respect you all as intelligent people; you'll buy or borrow the book from wherever you want to.
-- Amazon does contain additional information about the book that I'm either unable or unwilling to include. Yep, so do other book sellers, to a point. What I couldn't include if I wanted to : the text of published reviews. In looking for published reviews, I like to check out multiple bookseller sites because no one site contains all the published reviews. And, of course, the original review source, if it's available online and is free. I also like that booksellers contain all the info like ISBNs that right now I don't want to include.
-- Why not make a few bucks? Basically, if someone clicks on one of those links and buys something, I make a few pennies. To date, having done this program for over a year, I have made less than fifty dollars. The money is not the reason I'm using the program; it's more for the reasons above. But is it nice when I do find out I've made a few dollars? Yes; it gives me an excuse to buy DVDs.
-- Well, you may ask, why not link to the library and promote that? Truthfully, I haven't looked into it at all. If you prefer to get your books from libraries, I suggest using this Library LookUp Bookmarklet. Basically, if you're in Amazon (or any entity that includes the item ISBN in its URL), you click the bookmarklet and it brings you into your local library catalog to see whether or not your library has the item.
Different people use Amazon Affiliates for different reasons. And guess what? It's all cool; because, as I said, we are all intelligent people who are well aware of the issues about booksellers, mega sellers, independents and big business; marketing, advertising, and promoting; as well as looking at our time, how it is spent, and what we want out of it. I believe that of bloggers; and I believe that of blog readers.
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I read the line about "rites of passage (prom, college)" as "rites of passage (porn, college)". Oops....