FILM, EYEBALLS, BRAIN reviews "Life As We Show It: Writing on Film" edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn

Film, Eyeballs, Brain has published a review by Benito Vergara of Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn:

Organized, kind of, around the provocative question “if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?”, Life as We Show It features pieces that use “films and the culture that comes with it, as an ingredient for narrative impetus,” as coeditor Masha Tupitsyn puts it.

One or two essays are almost full-blown academic papers that are explicitly engaged with film history and theory; some have little to do with even cinema at all. Sometimes knowledge of the film being discussed is (probably) crucial to appreciate the piece (and therefore, my non-appreciation); sometimes it’s not. Creative nonfiction, a screenplay, poetry: it sounds like a fairly open-ended Call for Papers — both to its advantage and disadvantage — and the fragmentary, journal-entry nature of some of the pieces only helps to underscore the looseness of the collection. (Granted, the fragments do mimic the way in which cinema seeps into our dreams and flickers at the edges of our everyday consciousness: in half-remembered scenes, in random bits of dialogue.) But one person’s “fluid and limber” is another person’s “disorganized”. Eye of the beholder and all, no pun intended.

On the other hand, the more substantial pieces are really well-crafted: Kevin Killian, on seeing one of his students in a porn video; Wayne Koestenbaum, on Elizabeth Taylor (but then, it’s Wayne Koestenbaum we’re talking about here, whose capacity to meld sometimes stunning critical acuity with campy hilarity is probably second to none); Veronica Gonzalez, on Herzog (barely), tourism and marriage; Tupitsyn, on the bodies of Ralph Macchio and Jamie Lee Curtis; Richard Grayson’s “The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County”, on the ephemeral life of suburban theaters; and Myriam Gurba watching Kids and remembering herown traumatic adolescence.

Best piece, hands down: Dodie Bellamy’s “Phone Home”, a piece prompted by Spielberg’s E.T. What follows is a heartbreaking, almost obsessive examination of the film (and crucially, the DVD extras) as a way of working through her grief.

A good chunk of the book (sorry, I don’t have my copy in front of me, and it may even be more than half) deals with love and sex — limiting at first glance, but actually superbly appropriate. For what other medium lets us sate our scopophilia so easily, letting us hungrily consume (and vice-versa) the larger-than-life objects of our desire, with strangers in the dark?

Kevin Killian reviews Richard Grayson's "Summer in Brooklyn" at Amazon.com

We were pleased and honored to discover that the noted writer Kevin Killian (Shy, Bedrooms Have Windows), whom we've read with pleasure but have never met or been in touch with, recently reviewed Summer in Brooklyn at Amazon.com:

I became aware of this book after stumbling across some extracts on the net published by Brian Pera in his invaluable LIFE AS WE SHOW IT blog. The extract grouped together every time Richard Grayson went to the movies in the early 70s, and the diary entries from which this info was taken were immediately appealing and fresh--and real, the work of an authentically young man. So I ordered the book right away from Superstition Mountain Press, in order to get a bigger picture of Grayson's youth than just his movie going habits.

I was not disappointed. SUMMER IN BROOKLYN gives us the diary entries from Memorial Day through Labor Day, for six different years. Each day skips to a different year (1969-1975, so seven years get covered). At first Richard is eighteen, but often he is 24, and what a difference between the two ages! It's confusing and ultimately exhilarating, to see Richard slalom among all these ages, like a pinball in a giant machine. Soon however you will get a grip on the immutable facts of his life. Nurtured by a loving Jewish family in the Sheepshead Bay area, Richard grew up bookish and bright, already a storyteller by the time he enters Brooklyn College. In a way, it's like a Neil Simon play over again, except Richard benefits from the sixties sexual revolution and has some passionate sex affairs over time with girls like Ronna and Shelli. He's bisexual, or so he says, though we never see him having sex with any guys--maybe that's a pastime he saved for winter months. He fell in with the Fiction Collective crowd (book is dedicated to Jonathan Baumbach)), who encouraged his gift for postmodern prose, and turned him onto like minds.

It was an incredibly exciting time to be young, and the boys and girls of his generation believed they could change the world through direct political action. But they didn't let that stand in the way of having fun--and the inevitable angsty gloom of adolescence. SUMMER IN BROOKLYN is a time capsule of names from the news I never thought I'd hear again--remember Clement Haynesworth for example? Otherwise Richard works hard, makes good grades--seems to go to school all summer long, makes the reader feel that being a "grind" has all sorts of glamour. I can't wait to read more of Grayson's work, and as for that picture of him on the back cover, arms folded, waiting for me on his stoop pumped up in khaki shorts and a gray T-shirt, well, either it's a fluke shot or Richard Grayson actually is the most attractive writer ever.

As summer begins, this is the perfect book to reveal the hidden flavors of summers long ago and far away.