Category: quotes

I include trivia in each one of my newsletters. Subcribe here. 

• The idea for Back to the Future came when co-writer/producer Bob Gale was visiting his parents and found his father's high school yearbook. While thumbing through, he asked himself "What would it have been like if my father and I had been in high school at the same time?" 

• The idea for Home Alone came when writer John Hughes was about to leave on a family vacation then at the last minute scrawled down the idea "What if we left one kid at home by mistake?" 

• The following Christmas songs were written by my people, the Jews: "White Christmas," "Let it Snow", "Santa Baby," "I'll be home for Christmas," "Silver Bells," "Winter Wonderland." 

• The word "December" means come from the Latin word for "10," Back in ancient Rome, the calendar only counted only 10 months, beginning with March. The western calendar didn't start on January 1 until 1582, many centuries later. 

• The reason "lbs" means "pounds also comes from ancient Rome: "LB" is an abbreviation for "libra", the Latin word "to weigh." (via 99% Invisible). 

I include a series of reading recommendations in each edition of my newsletter you might enjoy…

Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (perfect for someone terrified of science like me). This completely-bananas saga of what's happening at The New Republic magazine. How the scandal of Sony's leaked emails and the cancellation of The Interview are our present not future. A speech by TV showrunner Shonda Rhimes that made me cry.  How podcasts are making serious money. The Strand Bookstore's recipe for success in the age of Amazon. The social shame of having bad teeth while living in a rich country like America. A nice remembrance of director Mike Nichols. "Requiem for Rod Serling" . And a book I'm really excited to read next: Who We Be: The Colorization of America, new book 8 years in the making by the brilliant Jeff Chang. 

Subscribe to newsletter. About twice a month. Always useful. No spam or skeezy business. 

Happy New Year! 

For the last few years I've read "Ring Out, Wild Bells" a poem by Alfred Tennyson aloud on New Year's Day. Though originally written as a eulogy for his brother-in-law, I find it a fitting end to the events of one year and the incoming hope of another. The first three stanzas are below… 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind. 

• The Ferris Wheel was named after its creator George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. an engineer from Illinois who began his carrer building bridges in Pittsburgh. 

• Also known as The Chicago Wheel, Ferris's ride debuted at the 1893 Columbian Exihibition in Chicago where it was the fair's tallest structure at 264 feet. 

• The Chicago Wheel had 36 cars, took 20 minutes to make two revolutions and carried 60 riders at a time. An immediate success, 38,00 fair goers rode it each day. 

• George Ferris had seen a version of the wheel a year before in Atlantic City. When his own design was a success, the inventor of the Atlantic City ride sued him. 

• Ferris had a terrible time keeping himself out of trouble and also spent two years in ligitation trying to get a larger share of the profits from the fair organizers. He died bankrupt at the age of 37. 

• Ferris's creation spent the next 10 years as a neighborhood attraction in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, then made an appearance in at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The ride was dynamited in 1906. 

• Because of their height, Ferris Wheels are often the visual stand-in for a much larger gathering of people be it an amusement park, a neighborhood (the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island) or an entire city (The London Eye). 

• Ferris Wheels say summer, enjoyment and romance (a Ferris Wheel car is a rotating kissing booth). They also, despite being several tons of steel, paint and machinery, feel fragile. The size but openness of the structure makes it at once grand yet unstabble and notoriously prone to malfunction and collapse. That Ferris's original wheel was dynamited and not dismantled (as it had been after its debut in Chicago) speaks to a kind of sudden end, a violent death.

  The idea that a Ferris Wheel can both signify a whole place yet also be dangerously ephemeral speaks to what we love and mourn about public amusement. Public amusments create other worlds. But those worlds are meant to vanish, to live more in memory than for real, to end suddenly and without explanation. They contain the seeds of their own ending.  

My next piece for BuzzFeed Books is a look at (mostly terrible) video games adapted from classic works for literatre. The image comes from the Great Gatsby Video Game which you can play onlne for free. 

The year is 1998. Filmmaker Spike Lee is ten movies into his career but things have hit a snag.  The writer/director’s last three movies have all been adapted from other people’s material and have done so-so with both audiences and critics. The harsher among them say that Lee–successful, admired, and a long way from earlier films (like Do The Right Thing) which have his stamp on every frame–is now phoning it in. For his next project, Lee thinks, he’s got to bring the “Spike Lee” back to “A Spike Lee Joint.” He’s got to write and direct. This story has to be both untold and recognizably his.

He calls the movie He Got Game. The premise: a father-and-son story about basketball. Untold? Not really. But then Lee jukes:  basketball is not just any sport, he’s argues, but more than football or baseball,  America’s Game.  To prove it, Lee opens with slow motion footage of hoops being shot in urban playgrounds and suburban driveways, by high school girls’ teams, across amber waves of grain. The music underneath, in case we didn’t get the message, is “John Henry” by Aaron Copland, a less-recognized piece by the most recognizably “American” composer of them all.  Copland, eight years dead at the time, even gets an onscreen credit.

Music by Aaron Copland

My newest piece for Salon97 on Movies and Classical Music. 

I'm going to be doing some writing for BuzzFeed Books. First up: "11 Great Bookstore Names and How They Got Them."  The above photo is from Entry #10: "Murder By the Book" in Houston whose tagline is "Where a Good Crime is Had By All!" 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

--Alfred Tennyson (via The Writer's Almanac)

Finishing tour for Practical Classics and a big announcement coming up. Stay tuned…