Heh:

It’s a good thing I find our culture collapsing in on itself pretty much completely hilarious, or it would be a really, really terrible time to be a critic.

A lot of you asked me to participate in the 10 Books meme in last Friday’s special requests thread.  I hope you guys won’t be annoyed by this answer, which is a bit of a dodge.  I just finished up a piece for The Atlantic arguing that influence isn’t just about the books that affected one’s reading or thinking.  It starts like this:

When I was 20 years old, I marched off to get arrested in a pair of gray slacks and a gray sweater that didn’t match and didn’t suit me. I certainly believed in the reasons and 14 of my friends and I were going to walk into the Yale Admissions Office, sit down, refuse to leave, and proceed to sing folk songs as loudly as possible. Reforming the university’s financial aid system seemed like a broadly good idea. But when it came to getting an arrest record for the cause, my decision can be laid at the door of Jean Merrill, a then-82-year-old children’s book author who’d never met me in her entire life.

As the “ten books” meme has swept the Internet, prompting writers to declare the importance of everything from Peter Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life to J.M. DeMatteis’ Kraven’s Last Hunt entry in the Spider-Man line in the development of their thinking, I’ve found my thoughts turning frequently to Merrill’s The Pushcart War. It’s not that her satiric portrait of urban machine politics and corporate titans—complete with progressive, pretty celebrities, poker-playing politicians, and truck company owners, plus a children’s crusade inspired by a jailed peddler—is the best piece of children’s literature ever written. But the memory of a fictional flower-seller and the influence of his arrest was one of the things that helped me say yes when my friends needed one more person to make the sit-in successful.The Pushcart War was one of the books that pushed me, a terminal bookworm, out into the world, that made me not just think, but act.

 I hope y’all like it; this was something I’d been working on even since before the request, and that I care about a lot.  I realize it’s a dodge.  But it’ll get at least some of my influential books out there for you.

So, I was watching All the President’s Men again over the weekend as background while I was doing a little writing, and had the great pleasure of noticing on screen who but Ned Beatty, so delightful as Det. Stanley Bolander in a minor role as the Miami State’s Attorney.  I really do love Bolander as a character.  The combination of bitterness and hope is irresistible:

And I suppose the happiness I take in noticing things like this is evidence of a terminal preference I have for supporting actors over leading men and women.  All the President’s Men is a marvelous movie for those  people who fill in the critically important details of a movie, who determine whether there’s oxygen in the world on screen, or just a few people moving in isolation across it.  Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Jason Robards alone make a feast.  And everyone else making up the movie’s Washington is really very fine too.

I ended up going to Beach House’s show at the Black Cat on Friday night somewhat unexpectedly, and it turned out to be quite the pleasure.  I hadn’t listened to the band very much before, but even though the exceedingly mellow sound means the group can’t build a conventional emotional swell in a set, the show had the feel of a backyard party, with big, pinata-like tinsel-decked objects rotating over the stage, and the crowd bopping quietly along.  I particularly like “Take Care,” I think:

One thing I’ll say about Beach House though, and this is a problem much more for the show as a live act than as a creator of albums, is the songs tend to meander off at the end.  In an album, they could blend into each other, but there’s a tentativeness about it when they’re performing live.  It’s as if they run out of things to say or do within the structure of a pop song.  And given that that’s the medium in which they’re working, that might be something for them to figure out.

The trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World looks completely charming and exciting.  It’s a great cast up and down, and even for the few seconds he’s in it, the trailer became another entry in the case Chris Evans is making for me liking him:

But the trailer shook loose something that’s been percolating in my mind for a while.  What would the recent history of movies look like if Patrick Fugit had become the indie darling Michael Cera is, and was taking some of the roles he’s taking now.  It may just be because Fugit’s six years older than Cera, but where Cera is a blank, Fugit’s always struck me as open, and vulnerable: there’s something behind those wide eyes.  I never understood why Juno was so nuts about Paulie in Juno, but I absolutely understood why Mary might be terrified and tantalized by Patrick’s attention in Saved!  I don’t think Cera’s ever had a performance that equals Fugit’s in Almost Famous.  Superbad is fine, it certainly captures a certain adolescent anxiety, but so does Almost Famous without the intense reliance on vulgarity (which is only a sin when it’s a crutch), and with a deep engagement with the transformative power of art.  I wish Fugit worked more, and got the recognition he deserves.  But in Hollywood even more so than in life, things are rarely fair.