BilmBlog500

Read this! I doubt I'd be where I am today if it wasn't for the guy pushing Omni samples at the Boskone dealers room at the Sheraton Boston on that fateful February weekend when my younger brother and I went with my parents, who had a bridge tournament or something like in Beantown that weekend. [And my thanks to SF Signal for pointing me toward the article.]

A Layered Security System. No single security measure is foolproof. Accordingly, the TSA must have multiple layers of security in place to defeat the more plausible and dangerous forms of attack against public transportation. Recommendation: Improved use of "no-fly" and "automatic selectee" lists should not be delayed while the argument about a successor to CAPPS continues. Recommendation: The TSA and the Congress must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers. Those are quotes from the 2004 report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. And as a quick alternative reading recommendation... Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post isn't one of my must-read columnist but her column's (you may need to register at the site) about as good as any I've read in discussing last week's airplane incident. Now, security and I have a kind of ambiguous relationship. ...

Some of you may have noticed that the blog went without posting for over three months... Well, for good chunks of August and September, JABberwocky was working at half capacity. I'm in LA. Eddie is at WorldCon. I'm in Florida. Eddie is on vacation. The intern is on summer break. In mid-September, I buy a new apartment, which I might not actually move into for a few months yet. Why? Well, I see the apartment as kind of building my dream home and want to move in when my home is ready. Some think I have a mental block against actually moving. In any case, selecting paint colors and looking for ceiling fans and designing a big built-in bookcase and getting appropriate new furniture and talking to contractors and figuring out how to light the bookcase and all sorts of things like that, some of which I've done infrequently if ever and am hardly expert at, enter my life. It's a little part-time job to go along with my full-time job. We return to usual attendance leve...

It was nice to see a movie on the big screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, which celebrated its 15th birthday this fall. My first film there was on the Loews Screen (Aud. #1), and that's where I was Sunday night for Up in the Air. Which is a very good movie, one instance in which the generally enthusiastic critical reception is spot-on. It's the third very good movie in a row for director Jason Reitman after the excellent Juno and Thank You For Smoking. It fits George Clooney perfectly. It joins Jerry Maguire and In Good Company, perhaps Office Space, in the pantheon of great corporate culture movies of the past two decades. I suspect most people are familiar with the basic concept. George Clooney is a modern day road warrior who works for a downsizing consulting firm. His job is to fly around the country firing people for bosses who don't have the guts to do it themselves. He could soon be on the chopping block himself. A young hotshot Natalie has come along wi...

We've just finished the last holiday season for B. Dalton. The last 50ish are closing, with one or two (the Union Station, DC location may be one) that will stay open as a B&N. Once upon a time, these were where we shopped for our books. It's my (correct) recollection that the chain was owned by Dayton Hudson , the department store chain that eventually became Target, and was sold to Barnes & Noble in the mid-1980s, just about the same time that I started my literary agent career. This was a minnow swallowing whale sort of thing. B&N used the Dalton cash to fund its move into superstores (modeled after Borders; though B&N likes to pretend it was first, Borders was already starting to open its large-format stores here and there around the country), was much more aggressive in shuttering its mall format stores than Borders was about downsizing Waldenbooks, and within another month or so will have exited the business completely. B&N also purchased the most...

I went to see Avatar on Saturday with Myke Cole , Peter V. Brett and Laura Anne Gilman . (At the AMC Loews Lincoln Square Aud #9 (Majestic). I liked it least. To get one thing out of the way, right away: the 3D is amazing. We saw in RealD digital 3D. This is the third movie I've seen recently in 3D, after Bolt a year ago and then Up, and this was the first one where the movie just seemed made for 3D, where it was an integral thing making the movie something more than it was, and not just doing it for the visceral thrill of having stuff come at you. It's still not exactly comfortable to wear the RealD glasses over my real glasses, but it wasn't a huge bothersome thing, either. We were in one of the mid-sized screens at the theatre and not one of the much larger and bigger, but the glasses still provided some sense of panorama instead of making it too much like watching TV, which was something I hated very much about Imax 3D circa mid 1990s. But... For all the exotic a...

I think I kind of fell into my Dec. 24 tradition, two or three parts of me merging into something bigger than the sum of its parts. 1983: I start to eat at Pizzeria Uno, and it kind of sticks. Occasional bad service aside, it's still comfort food for me 26+ years later. 1986: I move into NYC, on the fringe of a neighborhood that has a decent quantity of attached and/or single family houses where people can put out Christmas lights. Or, as I refer to them internally in an interfaith-y kind of way, Holiday Lighting Displays. I realize there are worse things to do than walk around on a December evening admiring the Holiday Lighting Displays. Early 1990s: Barnes & Noble opens a superstore in Bayside, kind of distant from me and in what is then a "two fare zone" because you need to take a subway to a bus to get there and there are no free transfers. It is a mile or so away from a Pizzeria Uno. 1991: I move to a new neighborhood that's almost all apartment buil...

As my business has grown and I've gotten busier, it's become harder and harder to do a lot of the things I used to do. After a year with more growth, more busy-ness, more challenges both good and bad to what I used to do and used to be, I decided it was important this holiday season to make the time for my two pre-Holiday rituals of yore. I had to touch base with my roots. Back before Bookscan, I tried to keep tabs on the books I sold, and at some level on the publishers who were publishing them, by running JoshuaScan. I would visit most of the bookstores in Manhattan and a few in Queens, and rigorously track the performance of my titles by eyeballing the shelves and such. The system was fairly accurate, though also subject to ridicule. Publishers could dismiss the information as anecdotal, or fail to recognize that if you poll 1739 people in the US you can predict a presidential race, hence visiting 2% of the B&N superstores in the world was not a bad glimpse into B...

For those people who like to slam Bookscan for tracking "only" 70 or 75% of the market, I have some bad news. Come the New Year, they've added BJ's Wholesale Club, Meijer, and the Paradies Shops to their reporting outlets. BJ's I think most people are at least familiar with, but if not, they're the 3rd biggest warehouse club after Costco and Sam's, and they've certainly been adding more and more NYC outlets in recent years, though none real convenient for me. Meijer, I have fond memories of from my college days in Ann Arbor. Back then they were Meijer's Thrifty Acres, which was and still is an early version of a Walmart Supercenter with groceries and hard goods all under one roof. I never shopped at one when I was in college because they were on the outskirts of town, but the name still brings fond memories. I did pop in to one outside of Indianapolis to see what the book department was like, and in the same power center as a B&N. So the ch...

While I'm cautiously optimistic that Borders is having an OK holiday season (it seems to me they've been less promotional with the Borders Reward coupons, which is a good sign), Borders UK is officially dead, a few years after being sold off to local management in a leveraged buyout. Other than for some lease guarantees and damage to the brand equity, this doesn't directly impact Borders US, but it's a very sad day nonetheless. When Borders decided to open up stores internationally in the late 1990s, I was a big fan of the idea. In the UK, it seemed smart that Borders purchased a local retailer Books Etc. which had some nice stores, mostly mall, but ranging from a tiny closet on Holborn St. to a huge flagship at their Charing Cross HQ. And it was exciting to me to visit the very happening Jam Factory Borders in Melbourne Australia in 1999 or the flagship UK store on Oxford St. when I went over for London Book Fair. While start-up costs led to some large losses, sales...

Over here , blogger extraordinaire Andrew Wheeler and I have been exchanging some comments about the latest Kindle statistic from Amazon. We got to exchanging on the royalty reporting publishers are providing for e-book sales, and I thought I'd paste a chunk of one of my comments here for the hometown crowd to enjoy, with a few add and extends... Don't get me started on e-book accounting with the major publishers. Some companies like Macmillan (Tor, SMP, FSG) aggregate all the e-book sales into one line, so there's no format information. Penguin gives a separate page for each ISBN, meaning each e-book format, but doesn't tell you what ISBN is what format. You guess that the page with the big shitload of sales is the Kindle, that the next biggest is Sony, and that after that life is too short. And since Amazon doesn't attach an ISBN to its Kindle pages, it really is a guess. Since these statements are six or eight highly uninformative pages, I end up aggregating the...

I don't know how the health care debate going on in Washington will play out. I've come out clearly in favor of liberal non-market approaches. And I'll admit that I want very badly for some kind of reform to get passed, please please please. My insurance carrier will be telling me soon how much the JABberwocky premiums will be going up come March, and in the meantime I've gotten the good news in a letter entitled "Supporting member health and affordability" that they plan to make our coverage worse. With that title to the letter, on the outside of the envelope, what else could it mean! Copays will go up. If I need a wheelchair or other orthotics, prosthetics or durable medical equipment, I'll get to pay 20% of the cost, and there doesn't seem to be any limit to the size of that co-pay. There are new co-pays for ambulances chemo, and radiation. If I need a wheelchair and have to pay 20% of the cost, it's safe to say I'll look to go to Jo...

I saw Invictus on Saturday night (at the Bow Tie Cinemas Palace, Hartford CT., auditorium # 14). I liked it quite a bit. After being a bit disappointed a year ago with Clint Eastwood's last directorial effort Gran Turino, I was quite quite pleased with this. It's a sports movie and historical biopic all in one, set in the first half of the 1990s. Nelson Mandela is released from prison, takes the reins of government in South Africa, and in an effort to build unity in the country throws his full support behind the Afrikaans rugby team the Springboeks that to blacks has become a symbol of oppresive white rule. The captain of the team is played by Matt Damon, who's fine in a character role that's much less showy than the Bourne movies or The Informant. Mandela is played brilliantly by Morgan Freeman. The movie is occasionally a bit too obvious, but generally in small quick ways as opposed. Maybe Mandela explains why he's doing a bit more often than we need, eno...

I just got a spare part for my Xerox printer, the size of which is approximately 9x4.5x1, in a 25x16x8 carton. I guess I should be thankful it came with sealed air packing, instead of two cubic feet of packing peanuts.

There may be a few lingering items in January, but the 2009 Variety Screening Series calendar ended with Iron Cross, the last time to star Roy (Jaws) Scheider, and Nine, the big new musical directed by Ron Marshall, whose prior big screen musical Chicago was quite successful a few years ago. Alas, Iron Cross (seen Tuesday Dec. 15, 2009 at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud., #1) is abysmal. Scheider plays a Holocaust survivor whose family was killed. He managed to escape into the forest, hook up with partisans, get some training as a fighter. His son marries a Chinese woman and the couple move to Nurenberg. Dad visits, realizes that his son's elderly neighbor is the Nazi who killed his parents, and vows revenge with or without his son's help. Some third act twists, but not many surprises between here and there. Scheider isn't bad, but pretty much everything else about the movie is. Scheider's character is prone to flashbacks; pretty much anything on the street will lead...

So Borders has announced its e-book strategy , and Random House is making a land grab . The Borders announcement fascinates me on several levels. If my distant memory serves, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, Borders contemplated opening Canadian stores in partership with Heather Reisman, now the CEO of their e-book partner and major Canadian book retailer Indigo. This did not come to pass because of the difficulty in finding a way to structure the deal that would pass muster with Canadian content regulations for book retailers. Or at least that's my distant memory, which may or may not be correct. And it was after this did not come to pass that Heather started to put together the Indigo retail empire in Canada. Borders is late to the e-book game. As they were late to the internet. Late to having a modern inventory system and in-store computer system. Late and still not arrived to having a rapid supply chain. But unlike the internet business, being late here mi...

Oh those Simpsons! I've probably watched the lion's share of episodes, and certainly pretty much all from the last 12 or 15 seasons. As the show's gotten on in years, there are the occasional weeks, and sometimes stretches of weeks, when the series shows its age. There are some ideas like the historical reenactments or fairy tale retellings that I can't stand at all. The show is a lesson in TV credits. The longer a show is on the air, the more and more people manage to get contractual producer credits of some sort or another. The roster that appears on air is now pushing 30 producers of various shapes and sizes in the opening credits. Most weeks, though, the show is pleasant enough, that it's worth watching because the only way to find the great episodes like this past week's is to keep plugging away, and then lo and behold once or three times a season there's something that works so wonderfully on so many levels that you just sit and marvel. This week...

So it's Awards Season, which means the Variety Screening Series is going on, and one again man of the screenings have a ticket allotment for Museum of the Moving Image members. I've cut way back on movies this year as I've gotten incredibly incredibly busy. Ten years ago, I would look for reasons why I should see a particular movie, and now I often look for reasons not to so I won't feel as bad about not going. But my general policy for the freebies is to say "yes" to the invite unless there's a scheduling conflict. Last year, that meant seeing the godawful Blindness and the excellent Rachel Getting Married and many others in between. Julianne Moore of Blindness was at the Q&A this year for the much better A Single Man, seen Monday Dec. 7, 2009 at the Landmark Sunshine, auditorium #1. This film, directed by the fashion designer Tom Ford (he headed Gucci, I am told), is based on the 1962 novel of the same name. A gay man in a closeted time finds...

Tiger Woods has gotten some very bad advice from a lot of people, but it's disappointing he isn't smart enough to have noticed. Haven't he or his handlers paid any attention to any other similar scandal, or to any of the steroid stuff in baseball, to know that it's a better idea to get ahead of the story, in public, than to leave on the stove? Even at the lowest temperature, a pot left to simmer eventually boils over. Some journalists have said we should all just leave Tiger alone and respect his privacy, but he sold his privacy long ago. He's never been a golf player who plays the game and goes home. He's marketed himself and his image. And when that image becomes a mysterious wee hours car trip on Thanksgiving, driving into a fire hydrant and tree, your wife standing over you with a golf club in her hands... It was bad enough at that, to decide not to be silent on all of it. Afghanistan depresses me. You can't win in life without occasionally going...

My local Wendy's had something new on Friday, a spicy chicken crispy chicken nugget. Yes, the breading from their spicy chicken sandwich applied to their longstanding crispy chicken nuggets.

So the news is announced today, not in any very exciting way so you can follow this link to Andy Wheeler's blog and other links from there (PW, NY Times etc. all have had little reports, Adweek was the first up maybe) that Kirkus Reviews is closing. Kirkus was one of the major pre-publication review sources in the publishing trade for many years, along with Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist. Since it had a tendency to be snarky, a good review always made people very happy, a starred review exceptionally so, and a bad review could be ignored because after all weren't they all that way. Even the Wikipedia page for Kirkus is terribly shallow, however, because nobody outside of the trade really cares. My recollection is that it had been family owned for many, many years. It was sold mostly to libraries and to publishers with very little circulation beyond. In a day when there were very few sources of broad coverage of books, it was a very important subscription ...

I played around some with a demonstration model of the Nook at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan on Thursday and was not impressed. E-Ink is E-Ink, so the screen look like all the others. But if the initial Kindle had a knock that it was too easy to turn the pages accidentally, I found it took too much effort to turn the pages on the Nook. And when I did turn the pages, the refresh rate was very slow, a good two to three seconds. B&N did acknowledge this problem, and they say it will be fixed with a software update in the near future. But isn't that the kind of thing you should work on before you release the product? Anyone think they decided to rush out something for the holidays? And then there's that LED screen at the bottom that's used for navigating. It's a nice idea, on one level, because one knock certainly on the first generation Kindle was the awkwardness of the little sliding side thingie to navigate around. But I think if they were doing the seco...

This will post six months to the day since I gave an interim report card to Borders CEO Ron Marshall, who came on the job after the holiday season a year ago. I love this guy! And I'm urging all of you to check out your local Borders this holiday season and think about giving them some of your business, because I think Ron Marshall has worked very hard and for the most part very successfully to position Borders for the holiday season and bang the stores into shape. By way of background, the prior CEO, George L. Jones, had not done a good job. First, he debuted his wonderful new concept store a very very short time before announcing the company was in a cash crunch. While I was roaming around visiting bookstores in LA, my thinking on this crystallized: this meant he either knew the company was running out of cash but was having too much fun with his new toy, his "buy a GPS, burn a CD" digital bookstore of the future, to tend to the important fact that he was running ou...