Barnes, Noble

I received a $25 gift card for Father's Day from my kids (ex-wife), which was very nice. Half as much as the Mother's Day flowers but longer lasting, to be sure. It's a little odd, though; I mean, Borders is only half a mile away from B&N and much cooler, but whatever. Plenty of things I could have gotten with my $25.

I had a vague notion to get A) a book on Film Noir, possibly the first volume of the Film Noir Reader (there are 4), or B) Some humor or cartoon book. However, I do scan the bargain books, as they're one of the first things you see in the store and you can get some great books there if you look hard enough. I have a Complete Shakespeare with gilt-edged, micron-thin pages, so no need for another, and I also wasn't feeling the Complete Sherlock Holmes for this summer, so I moved on. Barnes & Noble publishes some bargain books of their own, and while The Roald Dahl Omnibus looked like a steal for $9.99, I felt like when I want to jump into Dahl there's probably an even better collection.

There was a remaindered hardcover George Pellecanos book, Hell to Pay, and I'd had him on my mental list for years, based on a recommendation from Steven Grant, and the book was only $5.99, so I filed that away to see what else I liked (I had no doubts I would exceed the $25, but didn't want to go overboard). One of the weird things about my mind is that the $5.99 hardcover was actually less desirable than if it had been a quality paperback for that price, because I knew that if I ended up liking it, the other Pellecanos books I got would be paperback and they wouldn't "match." I don't think he's in quality paperback, though, just the fat little MMPBs that I really don't like reading anymore, but will, if the writer is good enough and that's all there is.

The Manga/Graphic Novels section had actually shrunk quite a bit since last I saw it--don't know what to make of that. There was one shelf unit full of manga except for the top, which displayed large, notable graphic novels and comics-related books like Eisner's New York Trilogy, Dan Nadel's Art Out of Time (I promise to review it soon--here's a preview: both the writing and the comics inside are overrated), others. The non-manga stuff got only two or three shelves and the order was pretty haphazard. There was a complete set of the Sin City reprints, meaning nobody bought one. I often like the idea of interlocking spines like that, and yet while it looks great on BUDDHA, it looks lame for Sin City. Not sure why.

Not a great magazine section in B&N, and I don't like how it's one huge wall and everyone can see what you're looking at. They can't sell many copies of Hustler that way, can they?

Over in the Architecture/Design section, there was an amazing three volume set that was enclosed in plastic and at different angles, so that Vol. 3 was facing, Vol. 2 was behind it but visible two inches more to the left, and Vol. 1 behind that and two inches to Vol. 3's right. A space hog, and I'm afraid you'd have to dump that case if you wanted to keep this on your book shelf, but still cool. Ironically, the set was devoted to the 999 best, most useful product designs of all time. I also flipped through Annie Liebowitz' AMERICAN MUSIC coffeetable book, which is less posed, Rolling Stone cover type stuff and a little looser and more photoessay, with text pieces from Rosanne Cash, Ryan Adams and other interesting and less obvious musicians. The Johnny and Rosanne Cash photo as they have a front porch guitar pull is ghastly. I mean, I love Johnny dearly, and maybe that's the reason I didn't see the need for the photo, where he looks nearly blind. The Ryan Adams essay is very good writing, actually, about his past habit for living in hotels and collecting movie stubs; it's simultaneously cool and affected, and he even calls himself a con man more than an artist, which is what a lot of people call him. I disagree, but it's obvious where that comes from.

I did get the Pellecanos book, and the other two books were from the Movies/Radio/TV section, which is criminally short on Movies and probably the other two as well. You're just not going to find Hitchcock/Truffaut in Barnes & Noble, you know? To their credit, they weren't stacked up with VideoHound 2006 or whatever, but it was still a modest selection. I got Peter (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, which is about the rise of the Sundance Institute and Miramax Pictures in the '90s. I had read much of Easy Riders before, in the store, and would like to finally have it, but it wasn't there. They did have the Film Noir Reader, Vol. 1, but it seemed just a little light for me on text, though the pictures chosen were gorgeous. I'll probably get it eventually, but I was looking more for chewy essays or interviews than glossaries and short profiles. I also personally have a problem with calling any film from the '30s a film noir, but that's just me. Call them gangster or crime pictures, but I think WWII is an essential element in real film noir, just in how it shaped the attitudes of the filmmakers, many of them European immigrants. I flipped through Saint Morrissey, a biography of the singer, but it just felt too personal and fannish for me, when I really would like something well researched that gets into The Smiths and his solo career with insight and depth. I ended up with Fool the World, an oral history of The Pixies, that is really good so far, just the band and their friends and associates in their own words, without a lot of drama but some interesting stuff. Who knew that Frank Black was so heavily influenced by The Cars and thinks the Pixies' "Is She Weird?" is very much like a Cars song? I love it that most interesting bands are always pulling from music you never thought they would be. As he explained, when he was growing up, he heard very little punk rock and listened to lots of other things before getting into Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Husker Du and other bands that don't quite fit the punk label like, say, The Damned do. And the image of Kim and Kelley Deal playing acoustic rock in the '80s, opening for Blue Oyster Cult or whoever, in Dayton, OH, where if girl musicians didn't know how to play Pat Benatar they were fucked, is incredibly funny and touching.