dean.smith's blog

I was reading movie critic David Thomson’s latest, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (2012), and enjoying it so much that I checked out a bunch more of his books including The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, but after a few pages of that one, I decided I'd had enough of Thomson's style for now. Maybe another time.

Spring is not apple season, but happily, for an apple lover like me, it's always apple season somewhere on the planet. So not only can apples be shipped to Austin any time of year, but it seems to me that they've improved. The new varieties are sweeter and crisper:  Pink Lady, Fuji, Jazz. It’s rare anymore that you bite into a mealy, dull apple.

So last night I’m watching Jon Stewart interview Steven Brill about his recent article for Time Magazine, “Bitter Pill”, and I really want to read it RIGHT NOW, and I think, all righty, let’s see if I can get it from the library’s databases at 10:20 on a Wednesday night with nothing but a card in good standing and a fully charged kindle fire.

The 1040 booklets have arrived. The Faulk Central Library, and the Howson, Milwood, Pleasant Hill, Southeast, University Hills, Windsor Park, and Yarborough Branches have them. Need help filing your taxes? If you make less than $50,000, Foundation Communities is there for you. Last year they prepared more than 17,000 tax returns, getting their clients more than $27 million in credits and deductions. Foundation Communities has seven locations in Austin, no appointment necessary, just walk in during open hours.

Where have I been? Star Trek, the original series, was remastered in 2007. A team of restorers digitized the original video, brightened the colors and deepened the contrast, and applied our experience of space travel since 1967 to the planets and the nebulae and the space ships so that they look and move more like we now know how they look and move.

I’m in the middle of the French Revolution; Louis the 16^th’s head just rolled. Napoleon is biding his time. General Alex Dumas, The Black Count, father of the writer of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, is performing the exploits that will inspire his novelist son. The author of The Black Count, Tom Reiss, came upon an archive of Dumas' papers locked in a safe in a French town. He'd not been entirely forgotten, but he'd been neglected...

Here are some of the holiday goodies you can check out from the library to have on hand to listen to in front of the fire or to slide into the DVD player when everybody's stuffed with Christmas goose. (The photo left is Alastair Sim whose 1950 Scrooge is still the gold standard.)

I just finished Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz. It was a little long on detail (important books can be fewer than 300 pages, don't let anybody tell you different), but hers was an illustrious life, and there's nothing like getting to the end of a 500-plus-page biography to give a reader a sense of grand scale. Julia didn’t find her niche—she could barely cook!—until she was in her 30s, so there’s hope for us all. WGBH paid her only $50 a show when she started on television in 1963—and she had to buy the food out of that!

Are you like me? Do you live an action-packed, sexy life of danger and intrigue, stealing rare, intermittent moments of relaxation surrounded by beautiful people in sumptuous locales sipping dry martinis? Why not? Could it be that you don’t know how to mix a drink? Fortunately the library has books on mixology so that you can take the first step toward truly elegant living. Everything else you need to know you can learn from James Bond. (The twenty-third Bond movie opens in the U.S. November 9.)

I just finished another book about movie history: The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s. It’s a surprising book if you take Singin’ in the Rain literally and assume that talkies supplanted silent movies overnight. Al Jolson notwithstanding, the studios weren’t willing to give up on their vast libraries of silents; they wanted to make money from them as long as they could, so they scored and added sound effects (but not dialogue) to some of their big hits and re-released them. Sometimes it worked. The Birth of a Nation, Ben Hur, and The Sheik, re-released with sound, pulled in audiences in the 30s.