notanotherbookreview

 Bamboo Dart Press has done it again, confounded expectations of what they publish with The 909 , a film by Mark Givens and Joel Huschle. David Scott Ewers, a Bamboo publisher and author of Ultimate Resort described the slender book. "Like a plastic mirror, The 909 reflects an image of California life that's both strangely attractive and not easy to look at. Unlike a plastic mirror, The 909 allows an even uneasier image to blossom in the shadow of the first. It is that of a sack being nailed to a shoe, forever. Funny and disquieting." This is a film that needs to be made, now that reality is catching up. It's a road trip where all cars move in straight lines and destinations shift. Shopping malls were once old downtowns. Abandoned strip malls are ghost towns. Starbucks, Best Buy, Apple stores exist, though people are few. Is this terrain related to the changes in area codes?  Why did L.A.'s 213 area code become 714 and then 909?  And why are codes continuing t...

  Peter Wortsman is good company; a raconteur known for his short fiction, stage plays, and translations, such as KONUNDRUM, a translation of Kafka that made me laugh. In EPIPHANY OF A MIDDLE-AGED PILGRIM:  essays in lieu of a memoir (Pelekinesis) , he relates   the trepidation of being middle aged, as well as the mysteries of a life half lived. In ( A forword) , he ruminates:  "The only difference between then and now is an accumulation of doubt. But doubt need not necessarily be debilitating. I dedicate these musings to the defining punctuation mark of middle age: the semicolon, a veritable hallmark of uncertainty." Wortsman can make the prosaic terra incognito, such as  First Memory , where a drawbridge and a child's fear of containing "pipi" merge. In  Rough Cuts , there's humorous swagger about the removal of a skin cancer like "a kind of shoot-out at the O.K. Corral." He also creates strangely beautiful moments that are absurd. In Spirit Tre...