I AM IRON MAN: Brian Doherty has written a history of the Burning Man festival, titled This Is Burning Man. It's a fine book, and I'm not just saying that because Brian's a colleague and a friend. It is, I believe, the most detailed account there is of the annual event. It's also a colorful, entertaining story about a bunch of colorful, entertaining characters, the sort of book that should hold the attention of even those readers who don't really care about Burning Man. It strikes just the right balance between enthusiasm and distance: Like a dissident patriot, Brian loves his subject enough to expose its disappointments and dysfunctions to the light.
Most important, it's a book about bohemian America. When you trace Burning Man's roots and follow its branches, you find secret societies of surrealists spelunking through hidden urban caverns, strange theatrical experiences that began as goofy pranks, utopian dreams of a new society in the desert, dystopian realities of infighting and rivalries and petty hatreds. It's a compelling story, and it resonates far beyond one temporary city in Nevada.
Also, my interview with The Wire's David Simon, originally published in the October Reason, is now online.
Finally: the seventeenth annual edition of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant, includes my story "A Short History of the Roosterville Poetry Massacre" in its list of honorable mentions. They spelled my name wrong, but I'm honored anyway. The story itself isn't reprinted in the book; if you want to read it, you'll have to order the anthology Polyphony 3 instead.
* "Like most of the characters in 'Silver City,' which opens nationwide today, Dickie dwells in a frustrating limbo, an idea uncomfortably trying to behave like a person."
* "I will forgo further plot summary because I don't want to bore you, and because 'Silver City' is itself more plot summary than plot."
* "Every time Mr. Sayles faces a choice between high-minded didacticism and persuasive drama, you can almost hear him tapping the lectern for your full attention. Occasionally, someone will throw a punch, shoot a gun or shed a tear, but mostly they stand around in medium-range shots, engaging in flagrant exposition. As Danny shambles along, asking the wrong questions and getting into trouble with the folks who hired him, you start to feel as if you're watching a very long episode of 'The Rockford Files' written by the staff of The Nation."
Sayles' sole big-cast, portrait-of-a-place movie that worked for me was Limbo, which (a) stopped being a big-cast, portrait-of-a-place movie about midway through, and (b) didn't have any political lessons to impart, which left the writer-director free to think about character and story. My favorite Sayles film is The Secret of Roan Inish, which has a small cast, no didactic political lessons, and an attention to character and dialogue (as opposed to caricature and exposition) that's completely absent from Lone Star et al.
I actually like what Sayles is trying to do in movies like Lone Star and Sunshine State. He's trying to film politically astute portraits of different corners of America, the cinematic equivalent of a sprawling social novel. Maybe if HBO let him do a miniseries, he'd have the space to illustrate his arguments with a story that doesn't feel like a clockwork-powered speechmaking machine.