BilmBlog500

To Close Michon loses to Ram in a tight first set and a not so tight second. Not many weapons. Piña colada ice, Thai dinner. 8:50 Michon is sinister! I mean, a lefty!! Playing a lot to Ram's backhand and trying to construct points. On serve 4-3 in first set. 7:30 PM Settling in for last full match of day. Could have watched Ricardo Hocevar and Carsten Ball on Court 6, but just didn't find either player all that exciting. So Court 13 has whenever seats, and I know nothing about the French player Axel Michon, who contends against American Rajeev Ram. So the match might be awful, but will have thrill of the new. Did watch a couple games of the Ashleigh Bart match whole waiting for this one to start. 6:50 PM Shocker! Guccione is up 40-0 serving for a tiebreak at 5-6. And he loses. Five straight points to Pospisil. One is a winning lob off of a net cord, the kind of thing you can't teach that's about instinct and reaction and quick hands. The final point of the match is a ...

Maybe I need to get out of town more. In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next. I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations. I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries...

In many ways, Boston is where it all began for me. February 1979, my parents and my younger brother are staying at the Sheraton Boston the same weekend as Boskone, we're allowed into the dealer's room even though we don't have a membership, somebody's pimping free samples of Omni Magazine, before you know it I'm reading stories by Orson Scott Card and George R. R. Martin, getting hooked on the stuff, and some 31 years later I'm one of the leading literary agents for sf/fantasy. There's also the six weeks I spent at Harvard in the summer of 1981 overshooting my allowance on movies, comic books and fantasy and sf novels. So whenever I go to an sf-y something in Boston, it always has a nice extra bit of resonance for me. With not too much lead time, I decided to take a break from NYC and head up to Boskone this year. So what's up in Beantown? Since my last visit a few years ago, the good news is that Pandemonium Books in Cambridge survived a scare a f...

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...

So the implausible first... The Taking of Pelham 123, seen Saturday afternoon June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium #1.  If you Love NY 1 Slithy Toad.  Else 2. Talk about finding laughs in all the wrong places.  The 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has its virtues.  The lead performances by Denzel Washington and John Travolta are quite pleasant to watch.  That almost goes without saying for Denzel Washington.  With Travolta, you never know quite what you might get.  But here, he's a good foil, playing a subway train hijacker against Denzel Washington's subway dispatcher.  There are some nice turns in the supporting cast, like James Gandolfini as the Mayor of New York City.  If you can live with the fact that 2009 is simply not 1974 in any way or shape or form, you can accept that the movie is acceptably updated and remade.  Oh, it goes too far.  The first movie ends in an almost anti-climactic and certainly very subtle kind of way, and the new version goes all the w...

For the first time in a long time, much longer than I can remember and this is probably not a good thing, I took four days off where I did not once check e-mail and tried to minimize the amount of time I even spent thinking about the job. I did have around 100 e-mails waiting when I got back, but the world and JABberwocky seem to have survived. This was to Connecticut to visit with my family. My parents came up for a few days, and the entire family (less one niece in Israel) got together Saturday afternoon for a seven-week preemie celebration of my mother's 80th birthday. I got her the 40th birthday card I neglected to obtain for her the first time around; that's the kind of guy I am. My mode of transport to CT is usually Metro-North Commuter Railroad to New Haven then Amtrak to Hartford. I could take Amtrak from Penn Station in NY, but Penn Station is such a pit of existence while the New Haven train station is so nice that I'd rather have time to kill in New Haven if ...